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"Marse Henry" 

jiN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 




HKXUY V.'ATTERSOX ( ABOUT 1908) 



"Marse Henry" 

^N AUTOBIOGRAPHY 

By 
HENRY WATTERSON 



Volume I 
Illustrated 




NEW^^alrYORK 

GEORGE H.DORAN COMPANY 






.1' 



COPYRIGHT. 1919, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
PRINTED m THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



TO MY FRIEND 
ALEXANDER KONTA 

WITH AFFECTIONATE SALUTATION 



"Mansfield,' 
1919 



A mound of earth a little higher graded: 
Perhaps upon a stone a chiselled name: 

A dab of printer's ink soon blurred and faded — 
And then oblivion — that — that is fame! 

— Henry Watterson 



[vii] 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER THE FIRST 

FAQB 

I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice — John 
QuiNCY Adams and Andrew Jackson — James K. 
Polk and Franklin Pierce — Jack Dade and 
"Beau Hickman" — Old Times in Washington . 15 

CHAPTER THE SECOND 

Slavery the Trouble-maker — Break-up of the 
Whig Party and Rise of the Republican — The 
Key — Sickle's Tragedy — Brooks and Sumner 
— ^LiFE AT Washington in the Fifties ... 49 

CHAPTER THE THIRD 

The Inauguration of Lincoln — I Quit Washington 
AND Return to Tennessee — A Run-a-bout with 
Forest — Through the Federal Lines and a 
Dangerous Adventure — Good Luck at Memphis 75 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

I Go TO London — Am Introduced to a Notable Set 
— ^Huxley, Spencer, Mill and Tyndall — Arte- 
Mus Ward Comes to Town — ^The Savage Club . 97 

CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

Mark Twain — The Original of Colonel Mulberry 
Sellers — The "Earl of Durham" — Some Noctes 
Ambrosian^ — A Joke on Murat Halstead . 119 

[ix] 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER THE SIXTH 

Houston and Wigfall of Texas — Stephen A. 
Douglas — The Twaddle About Puritans and 
Cavaliers — Andrew Johnson and John C. Breck- 
enridge 

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 



FAGB 



134 



An Old Newspaper Rookery — Reactionary Sec- 
tionalism IN Cincinnati and Louisville — The 
Courier- Journal 161 

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 

Feminism and Wom.\n Suffrage — The Adventures 

IN Politics and Society — A Real Heroine , , 186 

CHAPTER THE NINTH 

Dr. Norvin Green — Joseph Pulitzer — Chester A. 
Arthur — General Grant — The Case of Fitz- 
JoHN Porter 200 

CHAPTER THE TENTH 

Of Liars and Lying — Woman Suffrage and Femin- 
ism — The Professional Female — Parties, Poli- 
tics, and Politicians in America 219 

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH 

Andrew Johnson — The Liberal Convention in 1872 
— Carl Schurz — The "Quadrilateral" — Sam 
Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead — 
A Queer Composite of Incongruities . . . 236 

[x] 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



CHAPTER THE TWELFTH 

The Ideal in Public Life — Politicians, Statesmen 
AND Philosophers — The Disputed Presidency 
in 1876-7 — The Personality and Character of 
Mr. Tilden — His Election and Exclusion by a 
Paetisan Tribunal 268 



[xi] 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Henry Watterson (about 1908) .... Frontispiece 



PAGE 



Henry Clay — Painted at Ashland by Dodge for 
THE Hon. Andrew Ewing of Tennessee — The 
Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson's Library 
AT "IVIansfield" 56 

W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A. . . 64 

John Bell of Tennessee — In 1860 Presidential 
Candidate "Union Party" — "Bell and Ever- 
ett" Ticket 80 

Artemus Ward 112 

General Leonidas Polk — Lieutenant General 
C.S.A. Killed in Georgia, June 14, 1864 — P. E. 
Bishop of Louisiana 128 

Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868 When the 
Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were 
United into the Courier-Journal. Mr. George 
D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson are in the 
Center 176 

Abraham Lincoln in 1861. From a Photograph by 

M. B. Brady 240 

Mrs. Lincoln in 1861 25Q 

[xiii] 



"Marse Henry" 



"MARSE HENRY" 



CHAPTER THE FIRST 

I AM BORN AND BEGIN TO TAKE NOTICE — JOHN 
QUINCY ADAMS AND ANDREW JACKSON — JAMES 
K. POLK AND FRANKLIN PIERCE — JACK DADE 
AND "beau HICKMAN" — OLD TIMES IN OLD 
WASHINGTON 

I 

T AM asked to jot down a few autobiographic 
-^ odds and ends from such data of record and 
memory as I may retain. I have been something 
of a student of life ; an observer of men and women 
and affairs; an appraiser of their character, their 
conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, 
a kind of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew 
to a habit, has led me into many and diverse com- 
panies, the lowest not always the meanest. 

Circumstance has rather favored than hindered 
this bent. I was born in a party camp and grew to 

[15] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived 
through stirring times and in the thick of events. 
In a vein colloquial and reminiscential, not am- 
bitious, let me recall some impressions which these 
have left upon the mind of one who long ago 
reached and turned the corner of the Scriptural 
limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not 
yet feel painfully the frost of age beneath the 
ravage of time's defacing waves. Assuredly they 
have not obhterated his sense either of vision or 
vista. Mindful of the adjuration of Burns, 

Keep something to yourself. 
Ye scarcely tell to ony, 

I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state 
secrets or mysteries of the soul to reveal. 

It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. 
I shall not write after the manner of Rousseau, 
whose Confessions had been better honored in the 
breach than the observance, and in any event whose 
sincerity will bear question ; nor have I tales to tell 
after the manner of Paul B arras, whose Memoirs 
have earned him an immortality of infamy. 
Neither shall I emulate the grandiose volubility and 
self-complacent posing of Metternich and Talley- 
[16] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

rand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most 
part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to 
none of the honors of the historian. It shall be 
my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of 
the raconteur and to restrain the exaggerations of 
the ego. But neither fear of the charge of self- 
exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too 
obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper 
freedom of narration, where, though in the main 
but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon 
the scene and speak of myself; for I at least have 
not always been a dummy and have sometimes in 
a way helped to make history. 

In my early life — as it were, my salad days — I 
aspired to becoming what old Simon Cameron 
called "one of those damned literary fellows" and 
Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as "a lee- 
terary celeebrity." But some malign fate always 
sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy 
to become The National Gambler in Nast's car- 
toons, and yet easier The National Drunkard 
through the medium of the everlasting mint- julep 
joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would 
never linger upon my fair young brow. 

Though I wrote verses for the early issues of 

[17] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Harper's Weekly — happily no one can now prove 
them on me, for even at that jejune period I had 
the prudence to use an anonym — the Harpers, 
luckily for me, declined to publish a volume of my 
poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the 
great American novel." It was actually accepted 
by my ever too partial friend, Alexander Macmil- 
lan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and his 
successors refused to see the transcendent merit of 
that performance, a view which my own maturing 
sense of belles-lettres values subsequently came to 
verify. 

When George Harvey arrived at the front I 
" 'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that cast-iron man had 
never any bookish bowels of compassion — or politi- 
cal either for the matter of that! — so that finally I 
gave up fiction and resigned myself to the humble 
category of the crushed tragi-comedians of litera- 
ture, who inevitably drift into journalism. 

Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man 
of letters quite thwarted, I became a newspaper 
reporter — a voluminous space writer for the press 
— now and again an editor and managing editor — 
until, when I was nearly thirty years of age, I hit 
the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did 
[18] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while 
some faint ambitions of statesmanship — even office 
— but in the end discarding everything that might 
obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the 
world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes des- 
cribed myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a free 
nigger and not a slave nigger." 

II 

Though born in a party camp and grown to man- 
hood on a political battlefield my earlier years were 
most seriously influenced by the religions spirit of 
the times. We passed to and fro between Wash- 
ington and the two family homesteads in Tennessee, 
which had cradled respectively my father and 
mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and 
Spring Hill in Maury County. Both my grand- 
fathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian 
faith. My Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son 
of a Presbyterian clergyman, who lived, preached 
and died in Madison County, Kentucky. He was 
descended, I am assured, in a straight line from 
that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, as Burkle 
tells us, having declared in a sermon that Elizabeth 
of England was a harlot, and her cousin, Mary 

[19] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Queen of Scots, little better, went to prison for it 
— all honor to his memory. 

My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark 
in his day. He was decidedly a constructive — the 
projector and in part the builder of an important 
railway line — an early friend and comrade of Gen- 
eral Jackson, who was all too busy to take office, 
and, indeed, who throughout his life disdained the 
ephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons 
had migrated directly from Virginia to Tennessee. 

The two families were prosperous, even wealthy 
for those days, and my father had entered public 
life with plenty of money, and General Jackson 
for his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions 
or his career that interested me — that is, not until 
I was well into my teens — but the camp meetings 
and the revivalist preachers delivering the Word 
of God with more or less of ignorant yet often of 
very eloquent and convincing fervor. 

The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had 
not yet subsided. Bascom was still alive. I have 
heard him preach. The people were filled with 
thoughts of heaven and hell, of the immortality of 
the soul and the life everlasting, of the Redeemer 
and the Cross of Calvary. The camp ground wit- 
[20] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

nessed an annual muster of the adjacent country- 
side. The revival was a religious hysteria lasting 
ten daj^s or two weeks. The sermons were appeals 
to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings 
of the soul in ecstacy. There was no fanaticism of 
the death-dealing, proscriptive sort; nor any con- 
scious cant; simplicity, childlike belief in future re- 
wards and punishments, the orthodox Gospel the 
universal rule. There was a good deal of doughty 
controversy between the churches, as between the 
parties; but love of the Union and the Lord was 
the bedrock of every confession. 

Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative 
mind opening to such sights and sounds as it 
emerged from infancy must have been deeply af- 
fected. Until I was twelve years old the enchant- 
ment of religion had complete possession of my 
understanding. With the loudest, I could sing all 
the hymns. Being early taught in music I began 
to transpose them into many sorts of rhythmic 
movement for the edification of my companions. 
Their words, aimed directly at the heart, sank, 
never to be forgotten, into my memory. To this 
day I can repeat the most of them — though not 
without a break of voice — while too much dwelling 

[21] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

upon them would stir me to a pitch of feeling 
which a life of activity in very different walks and 
ways and a certain self-control I have been always 
able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain. 

The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials 
I learned then and there. I never had the young 
man's period of disbelief. There has never been a 
time when if the Angel of Death had appeared 
upon the scene — no matter how festal — I would 
not have knelt with adoration and welcome; never 
a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the ele- 
ments had opened to swallow me I would not have 
gone down shouting! 

Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. 
Theology came to seem to my mind more and more 
a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and 
divide the churches. I found in the Sermon on 
the Mount leading enough for my ethical guidance, 
in the life and death of the Man of Galilee inspira- 
tion enough to fulfill my heart's desire ; and though 
I have read a great deal of modern inquiry — from 
Renan and Huxley through Newman and Doll- 
inger, embracing debates before, during and after 
the Enghsh upheaval of the late fifties and the 
Ecumenical Council of 1870, including the various 
[22] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

raids upon the Westminster Confession, especially 
the revision of the Bible, down to writers like 
Frederic Harrison and Doctor Campbell — I have 
found nothing to shake my childlike faith in the 
simple rescript of Christ and Him crucified. 

Ill 

From their admission into the Union, the States 
of Kentucky and Tennessee have held a relation to 
the politics of the country somewhat dispropor- 
tioned to their population and wealth. As be- 
tween the two parties from the Jacksonian era to 
the War of Sections, each was closely and hotly 
contested. If not the birthplace of what was called 
"stump oratory," in them that picturesque form of 
party warfare flourished most and lasted longest. 
The "barbecue" was at once a rustic feast and a 
forum of political debate. Especially notable was 
the presidential campaign of 1840, the year of 
my birth, "Tippecanoe and Tyler," for the Whig 
slogan— "Old Hickory" and "the battle of New 
Orleans," the Democratic rallying cry — Jackson 
and Clay, the adored party chieftains. 

I grew up in the one State, and have passed the 
rest of my life in the other, cherishing for both a 

[23] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

deep affection, and, maybe, over-estimating their 
hold upon the pubHc interest. Excepting General 
Jackson, who was a fighter and not a talker, their 
pubHc men, with Hemy Clay and Felix Grundy in 
the lead, were "stump orators." He who could not 
relate and impersonate an anecdote to illustrate and 
clinch his argument, nor "make the welkin ring" 
with the clarion tones of his voice, was politically 
good for nothing. James K. Polk and James C. 
Jones led the van of stump orators in Tennessee, 
Ben Hardin, John J. Crittenden and John C. 
Breckenridge in Kentucky. Tradition still has 
stories to tell of their exploits and prowess, their wit 
and eloquence, even their commonplace sayings 
and doings. They were marked men who never 
failed to captivate their audiences. The system of 
stump oratory had many advantages as a public 
force and was both edifying and educational. 
There were a few conspicuous writers for the press, 
such as Ritchie, Greeley and Prentice. But the 
day of personal journalism and newspaper in- 
fluence came later. 

I was born at Washington — February 16, 1840 
— "a bad year for Democrats," as my father used 
[24] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

to say, adding: "I am afraid the boy will grow up 
to be a Whig." 

In those primitive days there were only Whigs 
and Democrats. Men took their politics, as their 
liquor, "straight"; and this father of mine was an 
undoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson 
and Jackson. He had succeeded James K. Polk 
in Congress when the future President was elected 
governor of Tennessee ; though when nominated he 
was little beyond the age required to qualify as a 
member of the House. 

To the end of his long life he appeared to me the 
embodiment of wisdom, integrity and couarge. 
And so he was — a man of tremendous force of 
character, yet of surpassing sweetness of disposi- 
tion; singularly disdainful of office, and indeed of 
preferment of every sort; a profuse maker and a 
prodigal spender of money; who, his needs and 
recognition assured, cared nothing at all for what 
he regarded as the costly glories of the little great 
men who rattled round in places often much too 
big for them. 

Immediately succeeding Mr. Polk, and such a 
youth in appearance, he attracted instant attention. 
His father, my grandfather, allowed him a larger 

[25] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Income than was good for him — seeing that the per 
diem then paid Congressmen was altogethr. insuffi- 
cient — and during the earlier days of his sojourn in 
the national capital he cut a wide swath ; his princi- 
pal yokemate in the pleasures and dissipations of 
those times being Franklin Pierce, at first a repre- 
sentative and then a senator from New Hampshire. 
Fortunately for both of them, they were whisked 
out of Washington by their families in 1843; my 
father into the diplomatic service and Mr. Pierce 
to the seclusion of his New England home. They 
kept in close touch, however, the one with the other, 
and ten years later, in 1853, were back again upon 
the scene of their rather conspicuous frivolity, 
Pierce as President of the United States, my fa- 
ther, who had preceded him a year or two, as editor 
of the Washnigton Union, the organ of the Ad- 
ministration. 

When I was a boy the national capital was still 
rife with stories of their escapades. One that I 
recall had it that on a certain occasion returning 
from an excursion late at night my father missed 
his footing and fell into the canal that then divided 
the city, and that Pierce, after many fruitless ef- 
forts, unable to assist him to dry land, exclaimed, 
[26] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

"Well, Harvey, I can't get you out, but I'll get in 
with you," suiting the action to the word. And 
there they were found and rescued by a party of 
passers, very well pleased with themselves. 

My father's absence in South America extended 
over two years. My mother's health, maybe her 
aversion to a long overseas journey, kept her at 
home, and very soon he tired of life abroad without 
her and came back. A committee of citizens went 
on a steamer down the river to meet him, the wife 
and child along, of course, and the story was told 
that, seated on the paternal knee curiously observ- 
ant of every detail, the brat suddenly exclaimed, 
"Ah ha, pa! Now you've got on your store clothes. 
But when ma gets you up at Beech Grove you'll 
have to lay off your broadcloth and put on your 
jeans, like I do." 

Being an only child and often an invalid, I was a 
pet in the family and many tales were told of my 
infantile precocity. On one occasion I had a fight 
with a little colored boy of my own age and I need 
not say got the worst of it. My grandfather, who 
came up betimes and separated us, said, "he has 
blackened your eye and he shall black your boots," 
thereafter making me a deed to the lad. We grew 

[27] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

up together in the greatest amity and in due time I 
gave him his freedom, and again to drop into the 
vernacular — "that was the only nigger I ever 
owned." I should add that in the "War of Sec- 
tions" he fell in battle bravely fightuig for the free- 
dom of his race. 

It is truth to say that I cannot recall the time 
when I was not passionately opposed to slavery, a 
crank on the subject of personal liberty, if I am a 
crank about anything. 

ly 

In those days a less attractive place than the city 
of Washington could hardly be imagined. It was 
scattered over an ill-paved and half-filled oblong 
extending east and west from the Capitol to the 
White House, and north and south from the line of 
the Maryland hills to the Potomac River. One does 
not wonder that the early Britishers, led by Tom 
Moore, made game of it, for it was both unprom- 
ising and unsightly. 

Private carriages were not numerous. Hackney 

coaches had to be especially ordered. The only 

public conveyance was a rickety old omnibus which, 

making hourly trips, plied its lazy journey between 

[28] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the Navy Yard and Georgetown. There was a 
livery stable — Kimball's — having ''stalls," as the 
sleeping apartments above came to be called, thus 
literally serving man and beast. These stalls often 
lodged very distinguished people. Kimball, the 
proprietor, a New Hami)shire Democrat of impos- 
ing appearance, was one of the last Washingtonians 
to wear knee breeches and a ruffled shirt. He was a 
great admirer of my father and his place was a 
resort of my childhood. 

One day in the early April of 1852 I was 
humped in a chair upon one side of the open en- 
trance reading a book — Mr. Kimball seated on the 
other side reading a newspaper — when there came 
down the street a tall, greasy-looking person, who 
as he approached said: "Kimball, I have another 
letter here from Frank." 

"Well, what does Frank say?" 

Then the letter was produced, read and discussed. 

It was all about the coming National Democratic 
Convention and its prospective nominee for Presi- 
dent of the United States, "Frank" seeming to be 
a principal. To me it sounded very queer. But I 
took it all in, and as soon as I reached home I put 
it up to my father: 

[29] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

"How comes it," I asked, "that a big old loafer 
gets a letter from a candidate for President and 
talks it over with the keeper of a livery stable? 
What have such people to do with such things?" 

My father said: "My son, Mr. Kimball is an es- 
timable man. He has been an important and 
popular Democrat in New Hampshire. He is not 
without influence here. The Frank they talked 
about is Gen. Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, 
an old friend and neighbor of Mr. Kimball. Gen- 
eral Pierce served in Congress with me and some 
of us are thinking that we may nominate him for 
President. The 'big old loafer,' as you call him, 
was Mr. John C. Rives, a most distinguished and 
influential Democrat indeed." 

Three months later, when the event came to pass, 
I could tell all about Gen. Franklin Pierce. His 
nomination was no surprise to me, though to the 
country at large it was almost a shock. He had 
been nowhere seriously considered. 

In illustration of this a funny incident recurs to 
me. At Nashville the night of the nomination a 
party of Whigs and Democrats had gathered in 
front of the principal hotel waiting for the arrival 
of the news, among the rest Sam Bugg and Chunky 
[30] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Towles, two local gamblers, both undoubting 
Democrats. At length Chunky Towles, worn out, 
went off to bed. The result was finally flashed over 
the wires. The crowd was nonplused. "Who the 
hell is Franklin Pierce?" passed from lip to lip. 

Sam Bugg knew his political catechism well. He 
proceeded at length to tell all about Franklin 
Pierce, ending with the opinion that he was the 
man wanted and would be elected hands down, and 
he had a thousand dollars to bet on it. 

Then he slipped away to tell his pal. 

"Wake up. Chunky," he cried. "We got a candi- 
date — Gen. Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire." 

"Who the " 

"Chunky," says Sam. "I am ashamed of your 
ignorance. Gen. Franklin Pierce is the son of 
Gen. Benjamin Pierce, of Revolutionary fame. 
He has served in both houses of Congress. He de- 
clined a seat in Polk's Cabinet. He won distinc- 
tion in the JNIexican War. He is the very candidate 
we've been after." 

"In that case," says Chunky, "I'll get up." 
When he reappeared Petway, the Whig leader of 
the gathering, who had been deriding the conven- 

[31] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

tion, the candidate and all things else Democratic, 
exclaimed : 

"Here comes Chunky Towles. He's a good 
Democrat; and I'll bet ten to one he never heard 
of Franklin Pierce in his life before." 

Chmiky Towles was one of the handsomest men 
of his time. His strong suit was his unruffled com- 
posure and cool self-control. "Mr. Petway," says 
he, "you would lose your money, and I won't take 
advantage of any man's ignorance. Besides, I 
never gamble on a certainty. Gen. Franklin 
Pierce, sir, is a son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce of 
Revolutionary memory. He served in both houses 
of Congress, sir — refused a seat in Polk's Cabinet, 
sir — won distinction in the Mexican War, sir. He 
has been from the first my choice, and I've money 
to bet on his election." 

Frankhn Pierce had an only son, named Benny, 
after his grandfather, the Revolutionary hero. He 
was of my own age. I was planning the good time 
we were going to have in the White House when 
tidings came that he had been killed in a railway 
accident. It was a grievous blow, from which the 
stricken mother never recovered. One of the most 
vivid memories and altogether the saddest episode 
[32] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

of my childhood is that a few weeks later I was 
carried up to the Executive Mansion, which, all 
formality and marble, seemed cold enough for a 
mausoleum, w^here a lady in black took me in her 
arms and convulsively held me there, weeping as 
if her heart would break. 

V 

Sometimes a fancy, rather vague, comes to me 
of seeing the soldiers go off to the Mexican War 
and of making flags striped with pokeberry juice 
— somehow the name of the fruit was mingled with 
that of the President — though a visit quite a year 
before to The Hermitage, which adjoined the farm 
of an uncle, to see General Jackson is still un- 
effaced. 

I remember it vividly. The old hero dandled me 
in his arms, saying "So this is Harvey's boy," I 
looking the while in vain for the "hickory," of 
which I had heard so much. 

On the personal side history owes General Jack- 
son reparation. His personality needs indeed com- 
plete reconstruction in the popular mind, which 
misconceives him a rough frontiersman having few 
or none of the social graces. In point of fact he 

[33] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

came into the world a gentleman, a leader, a knight- 
errant who captivated women and dominated men. 

I shared when a young man the common belief 
about him. But there is ample proof of the error 
of this. From middle age, though he ever liked a 
horse race, he was a regular if not a devout church- 
man. He did not swear at all, "by the Eternal" 
or any other oath. When he reached New Orleans 
in 1814 to take command of the army, Governor 
Claiborne gave him a dinner ; and after he had gone 
Mrs. Claiborne, who knew European courts and 
society better than any other American woman, 
said to her husband: "Call that man a backwoods- 
man? He is the finest gentleman I ever met!" 

There is another witness — Mr. Buchanan, after- 
ward President — who tells how he took a distin- 
guished English lady to the White House when 
Old Hickory was President; how he went up to 
the general's private apartment, where he found 
him in a ragged rohe-de-cliamhre, smoking his 
pipe; how, when he intimated that the President 
might before coming down slick himself a bit, he 
received the half -laughing rebuke: "Buchanan, I 
once knew a man in Virginia who made himself 
independently rich by minding his own business"; 
[34] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

how, when he did come down, he was en regie; and 
finally how, after a half hour of delightful talk, the 
English lady as they regained the street broke forth 
with enthusiasm, using almost the selfsame words 
of Mrs. Claiborne: "He is the finest gentleman I 
ever met in the whole course of my life." 

VI 

The Presidential campaign of 1848 — and the 
concurrent return of the Mexican soldiers — seems 
but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the 
camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day 
and night, Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal 
state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass 
and Butler side, and was correspondingly disap- 
pointed when the election went against us for Tay- 
lor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, 
on his way to Washington, General Taylor grasp- 
ing his old comrade, my grandfather, by the hand, 
called him "Billy," and paternally stroked my 
curls. 

Though the next winter we passed in Washing- 
ton I never saw him in the White House. He died 
in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fill- 
more. It is common to speak of Old Rough and 

[35] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

Ready as an ignoramus. I don't think this. He 
may not have been very courtly, but he was a 
gentleman. 

Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore 
well and to esteem him highly. Once he told me 
that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore, 
I like Clay — I like Clay very much — but he rides 
rough, sir; damned rough!" 

I was fond of going to the Capitol and of play- 
ing amateur page in the House, of which my father 
had been a member and where he had many friends, 
though I was never officially a page. There was in 
particular a little old bald-headed gentleman who 
was good to me and would put his arm about me 
and stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library 
of Congress and get me books to read. I was not 
so young as not to know that he was an ex-Presi- 
dent of the United States, and to realize the mean- 
ing of it. He had been the oldest member of the 
House when my father was the youngest. He was 
John Quincy Adams. By chance I was on the 
floor of the House when he fell in his place, and 
followed the excited and tearful throng when they 
bore him into the Speaker's Room, kneeling by the 
[36] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

side of the sofa with an improvised fan and crying 
as if my heart would break. 

One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me 
to a little hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue near the 
Capitol and into a stuffj^ room, where a snuffy old 
man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself 
over a pile of documents. He turned about and 
was very hearty. 

"Aha, you've brought the boy," said he. 

And my father said; "My son, you wanted to 
see General Cass, and here he is." 

My enthusiasm over the Cass and Butler cam- 
paign had not subsided. Inevitably General Cass 
was to me the greatest of heroes. ]My father had 
been and always remained his close friend. Later 
along we dwelt together at Willard's Hotel, my 
mother a chaperon for Miss Belle Cass, afterward 
Madame Von Limbourg, and I came into familiar 
intercourse with the family. 

The general made me something of a pet and 
never ceased to be a hero to me. I still think he 
was one of the foremost statesmen of his time and 
treasure a birthday present he made me when I was 
just entering my teens. 

[37] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

The hour I passed with him that afternoon I shall 
never forget. 

As we were about taking our leave my father 

said: "Well, my son, you have seen General Cass; 

what do you think of him?" 

And the general patting me affectionately on the 

head laughingly said: "He thinks he has seen a 
pretty good-looking old fogy — that is what he 

thinks!" 

YII 

There flourished in the village life of Washing- 
ton two old blokes — no other word can proprly de- 
scribe them — Jack Dade, who signed himself "the 
Honorable John W. Dade, of Virginia;" and 
Beau Hickman, who hailed from nowhere and ac- 
quired the pseudonym through sheer impudence. 
In one way and another they lived by their wits, 
the one all dignity, the other all cheek. Hickman 
fell very early in his career of sponge and beggar, 
but Dade lived long and died in office— indeed, to- 
ward the close an office was actually created for 
him. 

Dade had been a schoolmate of John Tyler — so 
intimate they were that at college they were called 
"the two Jacks" — and when the death of Harrison 
[38] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

made Tyler President, the "off Jack," as he dub- 
bed himself, went up to the White House and said : 
"Jack Tyler, you've had luck and I haven't. You 

i 

must do something for me and do it quick. I'm 
ihard up and I want an office." 

"You old reprobate," said Tyler, "what office 
on earth do you think you are fit to fill?" 

"Well," said Dade, "I have heard them talking 
round here of a place they call a sine-cu-ree — big 
pay and no work — and if there is one of them left 
and lying about loose I think I could fill it to a T." 

"All right," said the President good naturedly, 
"I'll see what can be done. Come up to-morrow." 

The next day "Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia," 

was appointed keeper of the Federal prison of the 

District of Columbia. He assumed his post with 

empressement, called the prisoners before him and 
made them an address. 

"Ladies and gentlemen," said he; "I have been 
chosen by my friend, the President of the United 
States, as superintendent of this eleemosynary in- 
stitution. It is my intention to treat you all as a 
•Virginia gentleman should treat a body of Ameri- 
can ladies and gentlemen gathered here from all 
parts of our beloved Union, and I shall expect the 
same consideration in return. Otherwise I will 

[39] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

turn you all out upon the cold mercies of a heart- 
less world and you will have to work for your liv- 
ing." 

There came to Congress from Alabama a roister- 
ing blade by the name of McConnell. He was 
something of a wit. During his brief sojourn in 
the national capital he made a noisy record for him- 
self as an all-round, all-night man about town, a 
dare-devil and a spendthrift. His first encounter 
with Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia, used to be 
one of the standard local jokes. Colonel Dade was 
seated in the barroom of Brown's Hotel early one 
morning, waiting for someone to come in and invite 
him to drink. 

Presently McConnell arrived. It was his custom 
when he entered a saloon to ask the entire roomful, 
no matter how many, "to come up and licker," and, 
of course, he invited the solitary stranger. 

When the glasses were filled Dade pompously 
said: "With whom have I the honor of drinking?" 

"My name," answered McConnell, "is Felix 

Grundy McConnell, begad! I am a member of 

Congress from Alabama. My mother is a justice 

of the peace, my aunt keeps a livery stable, and my 

[40] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

grandmother commanded a company in the Revolu- 
tion and fit the British, gol darn their souls!" 

Dade pushed his glass aside. 

"Sir," said he, "I am a man of high aspirations 
and peregrinations and can have nothing to do with 
such low-down scopangers as yourself. Good morn- 
mg, su'l 

It may be presumed that both spoke in jest, be- 
cause they became insej)arable companions and the 
best of friends. 

IMcConnell had a tragic ending. In James K. 
Polk's diary I find two entries under the dates, 
respectively, of September 8 and September 10, 
1846. The first of these reads as follows: "Hon. 
Felix G. McConnell, a representative in Congress 
from Alabama called. He looked very badly and 
as though he had just recovered from a fit of in- 
toxication. He was sober, but was pale, his counte- 
nance haggard and his system nervous. He ap- 
plied to me to borrow one hundred dollars and said 
he would return it to me in ten days. 

"Though I had no idea that he would do so I 
had a sympathy for him even in his dissipation. I 
had known him in his youth and had not the moral 
courage to refuse. I gave him the one hundred 

[41] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

dollars in gold and took his note. His hand was 
so tremulous that he could scarcely write his name 
to the note legibly. I think it probable that he will 
never pay me. He informed me he was detained 
at Washington attending to some business in the 
Indian Office. I supposed he had returned home 
at the adjournment of Congress until he called 
to-day. I doubt whether he has any business in 
Washington, but fear he has been detained by dis- 
sipation." 

The second of Mr. Polk's entries is a corollary 
of the first and reads : "About dark this evening I 
learned from Mr. Voorhies, who is acting as my 
private secretary during the absence of J. Knox 
Walker, that Hon. Felix G. McConnell, a repre- 
sentative in Congress from the state of Alabama, 
had committed suicide this afternoon at the St. 
Charles Hotel, where he boarded. On Tuesday 
last Mr. McConnell called on me and I loaned him 
one hundred dollars. [See this diary of that day.] 
I learn that but a short time before the horrid deed 
was committed he was in the barroom of the St. 
Charles Hotel handling gold pieces and stating that 
he had received them from me, and that he loaned 
thirty-five dollars of them to the barkeeper, that 
[42] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

shortly afterward he had attempted to write some- 
thing, but what I have not learned, but he had not 
written much when he said he would go to his 
room. 

"In the course of the morning I learn he went 
into the city and paid a hackman a small amount 
which he owed him. He had locked his room door, 
and when found he was stretched out on his back 
with his hands extended, weltering in his blood. He 
had three wounds in the abdomen and his throat 
was cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. 
A jury of inquest was held and found a verdict that 
he had destroyed himself. It was a melancholy in- 
stance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. Mc- 
Connell when a youth resided at Fayetteville in 
my congressional district. Shortly after he grew 
up to manhood he was at my instance appointed 
postmaster of that town. He was a true Democrat 
and a sincere friend of mine. 

"His family in Tennessee are highly respectable 
and quite numerous. The information as to the 
manner and particulars of his death I learned from 
Mr. Voorhies, who reported it to me as he had heard 
it in the streets. Mr. McConnell removed from 

[43] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Tennessee to Alabama some years ago, and I learn 
he has left a wife and three or four children." 

Poor Felix Grundy McConnell! At a school in 
Tennessee he was a roommate of my father, who 
related that one night Felix awakened with a 
scream from a bad dream he had, the dream being 
that he had cut his own throat. 

"Old Jack Dade," as he was always called, lived 
on, from hand to mouth, I dare say — for he lost his 
job as keeper of the district prison — yet never 
wholly out-at-heel, scrupulously neat in his person 
no matter how seedy the attire. On the completion 
of the new wings of the Caj)itol and the removal 
of the House to its more commodious quarters he 
was made custodian of the old Hall of Representa- 
tives, a post he held until he died, 

VIII 

Between the idiot and the man of sense, the 
lunatic and the man of genius, there are degrees — 
streaks — of idiocy and lunacy. How many ex- 
pectant politicians elected to Congress have entered 
Washington all hope, eager to dare and do, to come 
away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy 
to get back home — sometimes unable to get away, 
[44] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

to linger on in obscurity and poverty to a squalid 
and wretched old age. 

I have lived long enough to have known many 
such: Senators who have filled the galleries when 
they rose to speak ; House heroes living while they 
could on borrowed money, then hanging about the 
hotels begging for money to buy drink. 

There was a famous statesman and orator who 
came to this at last, of whom the typical and char- 
acteristic story was told that the holder of a claim 
against the Government, who dared not approach 
so great a man with so much as the intimation of a 
bribe, undertook by argument to interest him in the 
merit of the case. 

The great man listened and replied: "I have 
noticed you scattering your means round here 
pretty freely but you haven't said 'turkey' to me." 

Surprised but glad and unabashed the claimant 
said "I was coming to that," produced a thousand- 
dollar bank roll and entered into an understand- 
ing as to what was to be done next day, when the 
bill was due on the calendar. 

The great man took the money, rei3aired to a 
gambling house, had an extraordinary run of luck, 
won heavily, and playing all night, forgetting about 

[45] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

his engagement, went to bed at daylight, not ap- 
pearing in the House at all. The bill was called, 
and there being nobody to represent it, under the 
rule it went over and to the bottom of the calendar, 
killed for that session at least. 

The day after the claimant met his recreant at- 
torney on the avenue face to face and took him to 
task for his delinquency. 

"Ah, yes," said the great man, "you are the little 
rascal who tried to bribe me the other day. Here 
is your dirty money. Take it and be off with you. 
I was just seeing how far you would go." 

The comment made by those who best knew the 
great man was that if instead of winning in the 
gambling house he had lost he would have been up 
betimes at his place in the House, and doing his 
utmost to pass the claimant's bill and obtain a sec- 
ond fee. 

Another memory of those days has to do with 
music. This was the coming of Jenny Lind to 
America. It seemed an event. When she reached 
Washington Mr. Barnum asked at the office of my 
father's newspaper for a smart lad to sell the pro- 
grams of the concert — a new thing in artistic 
showmanry. "I don't want a paper carrier, or a 
[46] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

newsboy," said he, "but a young gentleman, three 
or four young gentlemen." I was sent to him. We 
readily agreed upon the commission to be received 
— five cents on each twenty-five cent program — 
the oldest of old men do not forget such transac- 
tions. But, as an extra percentage for "organizing 
the force," I demanded a concert seat. Choice 
seats were going at a fabulous figure and Barnum 
at first demurred. But I told him I was a musical 
student, stood my ground, and, perhaps seeing 
something imusual in the eager spirit of a little boy, 
he gave in and the bargain was struck. 

Two of my pals became my assistants. But my 
sales beat both of them hollow. Before the concert 
began I had sold my programs and was in my seat. 
I recall that my money profit was something over 
five dollars. 

The bell-like tones of the Jenny Lind voice in 
"Home, Sweet Home," and "The Last Rose of 
Summer" still come back to me, but too long 
after for me to make, or imagine, comparisons be- 
tween it and the vocalism of Grisi, Sontag and 
Parepa-Rosa. 

Meeting Mr. Barnum at Madison Square 
Garden in New York, when he was running one 

[*7] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

of his entertainments there, I told him the story, 
and we had a hearty laugh, both of us very much 
pleased, he very much surprised to find in me a 
former employee. 

One of my earliest yearnings was for a home. 
I cannot recall the time when I was not sick and 
tired of our migrations between Washington City 
and the two grand-paternal homesteads in Ten- 
nessee. The travel counted for much of my aver- 
sion to the nomadic life we led. The stage- 
coach is happier in the contemplation than in the 
actuality. Even when the railways arrived there 
were no sleeping cars, the time of transit three or 
four days and nights. In the earlier journeys it 
had been ten or twelve days. 



[48] 



CHAPTER THE SECOND 

SLAVERY THE TROUBLE-MAKER — BREAK UP OF THE 

WHIG PARTY AND RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN 

THE SICKLES TRAGEDY BROOKS AND SUMNER 

— ^LIFE AT WASHINGTON IN THE FIFTIES 



WHETHER the War of Sections — as it 
should be called, because, except in East- 
ern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, 
Maryland, Kentucky and JMissouri, it was nowise a 
civil war — could have been averted must ever re- 
main a question of useless speculation. In recogniz- 
ing the institution of African slavery, with no pro- 
vision for its ultimate removal, the Federal Union 
set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The 
wiser heads of the Constitutional Convention per- 
ceived this plainly enough; its dissonance to the 
logic of their movement ; on the sentimental side its 
repugnancy; on the practical side its doubtful 
economy; and but for the tobacco growers and the 

[49] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

cotton planters it had gone by the board. The 
North soon found slave labor unprofitable and rid 
itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the South, it 
came to represent in the Southern mind a "right" 
which the South was bound to defend. 

Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon 
had once said to him in answer to his urgency for 
the recognition of the Southern Confederacy: "I 
have talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston 
and we are both of the opinion that as long as 
African slavery exists at the South, France and 
England cannot recognize the Confederacy. They 
do not demand its instant abolition. But if you 
put it in course of abatement and final abolishment 
through a term of years — I do not care how many 
— we can intervene to some purpose. As matters 
stand we dare not go before a European congress 
with such a proposition." 

Mr. Slidell passed it up to Richmond. Mr. 
Davis passed it on to the generals in the field. The 
response he received on every hand was the state- 
ment that it would disorganize and disband the 
Confederate Armies. Yet we are told, and it is 
doubtless true, that scarcely one Confederate sol- 
dier in ten actually owned a slave. 
[50] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories 
resolve themselves into claims; and interests, how- 
ever mistaken, rise to the dignity of prerogatives. 

n 

The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. 
I was witness to the dechne and fall of the old 
Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party. 
There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after 
the Compromise JNIeasures of 1850, but the over- 
whelming defeat of the Whigs in 1852 and the 
dominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of 
Mr. Pierce brought the agitation back again. Mr. 
Davis was a follower of Mr. Calhoun — though it 
may be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever 
have been willing to go to the length of secession 
— and Mr. Pierce being by temperament a South- 
erner as well as in opinions a pro-slavery Demo- 
crat, his Administration fell under the spell of the 
ultra Southern wing of the party. The Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill was originaly harmless enough, but 
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which on 
Mr. Davis' insistence was made a part of it, let 
slip the dogs of war. 

In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and 

[51] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

pliant instrument. Like Clay, Webster and Cal- 
houn before him, Judge Douglas had the presi- 
dential bee in his bonnet. He thought the South 
would, as it could, nominate and elect him Presi- 
dent. 

Personally he was a most lovable man — rather 
too convivial — and for a while in 1852 it looked as 
though he might be the Democratic nominee. His 
candidacy was premature, his backers overconfident 
and indiscreet. 

"I like Douglas and am for him," said Buck 
Stone, a member of Congress and delegate to the 
National Democratic Convention from Kentucky, 
"though I consider him a good deal of a damn 
fool." Pressed for a reason he continued: "Why, 
think of a man wanting to be President at forty 
years of age, and obliged to behave himself for the 
rest of his life! I wouldn't take the job on any 
such terms." 

The proposed repeal of the Missouri Com- 
promise opened up the slavery debate anew and 
gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke 
loose among the political elements. The issues 
which had divided Whigs and Democrats went to 
the rear, while this one paramount issue took 
[52] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

possession of the stage. It was welcomed by the 
extremists of both sections, a very godsend to the 
beaten pohticians led by Mr. Seward. Rampant 
sectionalism was at first kept a little in the back- 
ground. There were on either side concealments 
and reserves. Many patriotic men put the Union 
above slavery or antislavery. But the two sets of 
rival extremists had their will at last, and in seven 
short years deepened and embittered the conten- 
tion to the degree that disunion and war seemed, 
certainly proved, the only way out of it. 

The extravagance of the debates of those years 
amazes the modern reader. Occasionally when I 
have occasion to recur to them I am myself non- 
plussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the 
time. My father was a leader of the Union wing 
of the Democratic Party — headed in 1860 the 
Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee — and re- 
mained a Unionist during the War of Sections. 
He broke away from Pierce and retired from the 
editorship of the Washiongton Union upon the 
issue of the repeal of the INIissouri Compromise, to 
which he was opposed, refusing the appointment 
of Governor of Oregon, with which the President 
sought to placate him, though it meant his return 

[53] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, 
when he and Oregon's delegate in Congress, Gen. 
Joseph Lane — the Lane of the Breckenridge and 
Lane ticket of 1860 — had brought the territory of 
Oregon in as a state. 

I have often thought just where I would have 
come in and what might have happened to me if he 
had accepted the appointment and I had grown to 
manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I at- 
tended a school in Philadelphia — the Protestant 
Episcopal Academy — came home to Tennessee in 
1856, and after a season with private tutors found 
myself back in the national capital in 1858. 

It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions 
of my own. I was going to be a great man of let- 
ters. I was going to write histories and dramas and 
romances and poetry. But as I had set up for 
myself I felt in honor bound meanwhile to earn 

my own living. 

Ill 

I take it that the early steps of every man to 
get a footing may be of interest when fairly told. 
I sought work in New York with indifferent suc- 
cess. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me 
play the piano at which from childhood I had re- 
[54] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ceived careful instruction, gave me a job as "musi- 
cal critic" during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the 
regular critic. I must have done my work ac- 
ceptably, since I was not fired. It included a re- 
port of the debut of my boy-and-girl companion, 
Adelina Patti, when she made her first appearance 
in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the 
saying is, I did not "catch on." There might be a 
more promising opening in Washington, and 
thither I repaired. 

The Daily States had been established there by 
John P. Heiss, who with Thomas Ritchie had 
years before established the Washington Union. 
Roger A. Pryor was its nominal editor. But he 
soon took himself home to his beloved Virginia and 
came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the 
Siiates was being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, 
later along Confederate commissioner to France, 
preceding Mr. Slidell. 

Colonel Mann wished to work incognito, I was 
taken on as a kind of go-between and, as I may say, 
figurehead, on the strength of being my father's 
son and a very self-confident young gentleman, 
and began to get my newspaper education in point 
of fact as a kind of fetch-and-carry for Major 

[55] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who 
had started the Union at Nashville as well as the 
Union at Washington and the Crescent — maybe it 
was the Delta — at New Orleans ; and for the rudi- 
ments of newspaper work I could scarcely have had 
a better teacher. 

Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the 
States was a remarkable woman. She was Mrs. 
Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, 
of Texas, who had a claim before Congress. 
Though she was unknown to fame, Thomas A. 
Benton used to say that she had more to do with 
making and ending the Mexican War than any- 
body else. 

Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone 
with her newly wedded husband, an adventurous 
Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande 
and started a settlement thev called Eagle Pass. 

•/ CD 

Storm died, the Texas outbreak began, and the 
young widow was driven back to San Antonio, 
where she met and married Casneau, one of Hous- 
ton's lieutenants, like herself a New Yorker. She 
was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to the City 
of Mexico and actually wrote the final treaty. It 
was she who dubbed William Walker "the little 
[56] 




HENRY CI.AY PAINTED AT ASHI.ANU BY DODGE FOR THE HON. 

ANDREW EWIXG OF TENNESSEE THE ORIGINAL HANGS IN 

MR. WATTERSON'S LIBRARY AT "MANSTIEI.d" 



"MARSE HENRY" 

gray-eyed man of destiny," and put the nickname 
"Old Fuss and Feathers" on General Scott, whom 
she heartily disliked. 

A braver, more intellectual woman never lived. 
She must have been a beauty in her youth ; was still 
very comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto and a 
terror with her pen. God made and equipped her 
for a filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge 
of Spanish- American affairs, looked like a Span- 
ish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish lan- 
guage fluently. Her obsession w^as the bringing of 
Central America into the Federal Union. But 
she was not without literary aspirations and had 
some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. 
Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovelv home in 
Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her 
works and articles, was a lovely woman. She used 
to take me to visit this lady. With iMajor Heiss 
she divided my new^spaper education, her part of it 
being the v/riting part. Whatever I may have at- 
tained in that line I largely owe to her. She took 
great pains with me and mothered me in the ab- 
sence of my own mother, who had long been her 
very dear friend. To get rid of her, or rather her 
pen, Mr. Buchanan gave General Casneau, when 

[57] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the Douglas schism was breaking out, a Central 
American mission, and she and he were lost by 
shipwreck on their way to this post, somewhere in 
Caribbean waters. 

My immediate yokemate on the States was John 
Savage, "Jack," as he was commonly called; a 
brilliant Irishman, who with Devin Reilley and 
John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, his 
intimates, and Joseph Brennan, his brother-in-law, 
made a pretty good Irishman of me. They were 
'48 men, with literary gifts of one sort and an- 
other, who certainly helped me along with my writ- 
ing, but, as matters fell out, did not go far enough 
to influence my character, for they were a wild lot, 
full of taking enthusiasm and juvenile decrepi- 
tude of judgment, ripe for adventures and ready 
for any enterprise that promised fun and fighting. 

Between John Savage and Mrs. Casneau I had 
the constant spur of commendation and assistance 
as well as affection. I passed all my spare time in 
the Library of Congress and knew its arrange- 
ments at least as well as Mr. Meehan, the librarian, 
and Robert Kearon, the assistant, much to the sur- 
prise of Mr. Spofford, who in 1861 succeeded Mr. 
Meehan as librarian. 
[38] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Not long after my return to Washington Col. 
John W. Forney picked me up, and I was em- 
ployed in addition to my not very arduous duties 
on the States to write occasional letters from Wash- 
ington to the Philadelphia Press. Good fortune 
like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without any- 
body's interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, 
a real "sinecure," in the Interior Department by 
Jacob Thompson, the secretary, my father's old 
colleague in Congress. When the troubles of 
1860-61 rose I was literally doing "a land-ofRce 
business," with money galore and to spare. Some- 
how, I don't know how, I contrived to spend it, 
though I had no vices, and worked like a hired man 
upon my literary hopes and newspaper obligations. 

Life in Washington under these conditions was 
delightful. I did not know how my heart was 
wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My 
father stood high in public esteem. My mother 
was a leader in society. All doors were open to 
me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee 
in the midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cin- 
cinnati, there happened a railway break and a halt 
of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I strolled 
down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, 

[59] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

almost despairing — nigh heartbroken — when I be- 
gan to feel an irresistible fascination about the 
swift -flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran 
away; and that is the only thought of suicide that 

I can recall. 

IV 

Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her "Belle of the 
Fifties" has given a graphic picture of life in the 
national capital during the administrations of Pierce 
and Buchanan. The South was very much in the 
saddle. Pierce, as I have said, was Southern in 
temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he did 
not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, "a 
winning way of making himself hateful," was an 
aristocrat under Southern and feminine influence. 

I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never en- 
dure Mr. Buchanan. Plis verj'- voice gave offense 
to me. Directed by a periodical publication to 
make a sketch of him to accompany an engraving, 
I did my best on it. 

Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, 
said to me: "Now, Henry, here's your chance for 
a foreign appointment." 

I now know that my writing was clumsy enough 
and my attempt to play the courtier clumsier still. 
[60] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and mother 
"Old Buck" might have been a little more con- 
siderate than he was with a lad trying to please and 
do him honor. I came away from the White House 
my amour propre wounded, and though I had not 
far to go went straight into the Douglas camp. 

Taking nearly sixty j^ears to think it over I have 
reached the conclusion that Mr. Buchanan was the 
victim of both personal and historic injustice. With 
secession in sight his one aim was to get out of the 
White House before the scrap began. He was of 
course on terms of intimacy with all the secession 
leaders, especially Mr. Slidell, of Louisiana, like 
himself a Northerner by birth, and JNIr. Mason, a 
thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted Virginian. It was not 
in him or in Mr. Pierce, with their antecedents and 
associations, to be uncompromising Federalists. 
There was no clear law to go on. INIoderate men 
were in a muck of doubt just what to do. With 
Horace Greeley Mr. Buchanan was ready to say 
"Let the erring sisters go." This indeed was the 
extent of Mr. Pierce's pacifism during the War of 
Sections. 

A new party risen upon the remains of the Whig 
Party — the Republican Party — was at the door 

[61] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slavery 
Democrats could not look on with equanimity, still 
less with complaisance, and doubtless Pierce and 
Buchanan to the end of their days thought less of 
the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a 
consequence Republican writers have given quarter 
to neither of them. 

It will not do to go too deeply into the account 
of those days. The times were out of joint. I 
knew of two Confederate generals who first tried 
for commissions in the Union Army; gallant and 
good fellows too ; but they are both dead and their 
secret shall die with me. I knew likewise a famous 
Union general who was about to resign his com- 
mission in the army to go with the South but was 
prevented by his wife, a Northern woman, who had 
obtained of Mr. Lincoln a brigadier's commission. 



In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was 
Mrs. Senator Gwin's fancy dress baU, written of, 
talked of, far and wide. I did not get to attend 
this. My costume was prepared — a Spanish 
cavalier, Mrs. Casneau's doing — when I fell ill and 
had with bitter disappointment to read about it 
[62] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

next day in the papers. I was living at Willard's 
Hotel, and one of my volunteer nurses was Mrs. 
Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing who was 
soon to become the victim of a murder and world 
scandal. Her husband was a member of the House 
from New York, and during his frequent absences 
I used to take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been 
]Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of Legation in London, 
and both she and he were at home in the White 
House. 

She was an innocent child. She never knew what 
she was doing, and when a year later Sickles, hav- 
ing killed her seducer — a handsome, unscrupulous 
fellow who understood how to take advantage of 
a husband's neglect — forgave her and brought her 
home in the face of much obloquy, in mj^ heart of 
hearts I did homage to his courage and generosity, 
for she was then as he and I both knew a dying 
woman. She did die but a few months later. He 
was by no means a politician after my fancy or 
approval, but to the end of his days I was his friend 
and could never bring myself to join in the re- 
peated public outcries against him. 

Early in the fifties Willard's Hotel became a 
kind of headquarters for the two political extremes. 

[63] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

During a long time their social intercourse was un- 
restrained — often joyous. They were too far 
apart, figuratively speaking, to come to blows. 
Truth to say, their aims were after all not so far 
apart. They played to one another's lead. Many 
a time have I seen Keitt, of South Carolina, and 
Burlingame, of Massachusetts, hobnob in the live- 
liest manner and most public places. 

It is certainly true that Brooks was not him- 
self when he attacked Sumner. The Northern 
radicals were wont to say, "Let the South go," the 
more profane among them interjecting "to hell!" 
The Secessionists liked to prod the New England- 
ers with what the South was going to do when they 
got to Boston. None of them really meant it — 
not even Toombs when he talked about calling the 
muster roll of his slaves beneath Bunker Hill 
Monument ; nor Hammond, the son of a New Eng- 
land schoolmaster, when he spoke of the "mudsills 
of the North," meaning to illustrate what he was 
saying by the underpinning of a house built on 
marshy ground, and not the Northern work people. 

Toombs, who was a rich man, not quite impover- 
ished by the war, banished himself in Europe for a 
number of years. At length he came home, and 
[64] 




W. p. HARDEE. LIEUTENANT GENEHAI, C. S. A. 



*'MARSE HENRY" 

passing the White House at Washington he called 
and sent his card to the President. General Grant, 
the most genial and generous of men, had him come 
directly up. 

"Mr. President," said Toombs, "in my European 
migrations I have made it a rule when arriving in 
a city to call first and pay my respects to the Chief 
of Pohce." 

The result was a most agreeable hour and an in- 
vitation to dinner. Not long after this at the hos- 
pitable board of a Confederate general, then an 
American senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar 
about his speech in the House upon the occasion of 
the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not quick 
to quarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish 
temper and courage. The subject had become dis- 
tasteful to him. He was growing obviously restive 
under Toombs' banter. The ladies of the house- 
hold apprehending what was coming left the table. 

Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs' visit 
to Grant, "crawling at the seat of power," against 
his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard 
such a scoring from one man to another. It was 
magisterial in its dignity, deadly in its diction. 
Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the 

[65] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, 
had finished, Toombs without a ruffle said, "Lamar, 
you surprise me," and the host, with the rest of us, 
took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the 
ladies in the drawing-room. Of course nothing 
came of it. 

Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. 
I have ridden with him under fire and heard him 
crack jokes with Minie balls flying uncomfortably 
about. Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben 
Wade. "Yes, yes," said Wade; "I never did be- 
lieve in the doctrine of total depravity." 

But I am running ahead in advance of events. 

VI 

There came in 1853 to the Thirty- third Congress 
a youngish, dapper and graceful man notable as 
the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation. 
It was said that he had been a dancing master, his 
wife a work girl. They brought with them a baby 
in arms with the wife's sister for its nurse — a mis- 
step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now 
tell just how I came to be very intimate with them 
except that they lived at Willard's Hotel. His 
[66] 



'MARSE HENRY" 

name had a pretty sound to it — Nathaniel Prentiss 
Banks. 

A schoohnate of mine and myself, greatly to the 
mirth of those about us, undertook Mr. Banks' 
career. We were going to elect him Speaker of 
the next House and then President of the United 
States. This was particularly laughable to my 
mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the con- 
temporary Speaker, who had very sohd presidential 
aspirations of his own. 

The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. 
Banks, to whom we two were ardently devoted. I 
have not seen her since those days, more than sixty 
years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed 
me, still hngers in my memory — a gentle, sweet 
creature who made much of us boys — and two 
years later when Mr. Banks was actually elected 
Speaker I was gr^tly elated and took some of 
the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards 
General Banks and I had our seats close together 
in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did not re- 
call me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless 
I warmed to hun, and when during Cleveland's first 
term he came to me with a hard-luck story I was 
glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been 

[67] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and 
a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a faded old 
man, very commonplace, and except for the little 
post he held under Government pitiably helpless. 

Colonel George Walton was one of my father's 
intimates and an imposing and familiar figure 
about Washington. He was the son of a signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, a distinction in 
those days, had been mayor of Mobile and was an 
unending raconteur. To my childish mind he ap- 
peared to know everything that ever had been or 
ever would be. He would tell me stories by the 
hour and send me to buy him lottery tickets. I 
afterward learned that that form of gambling was 
his mania. I also learned that many of his stories 
were apocryphal or very highly colored. 

One of these stories especially took me. It re* 
lated how when he was on a yachting cruise in the 
Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by pirates, 
and how he being the likeliest of the company was 
tied up and whipped to make him disgorge, or tell 
where the treasure was. 

"Colonel Walton," said I, "did the whipping 
hurt you much?" 
[68] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

"Sir," he replied, as if I were a grown-up, "they 
whipped me until I was perfectly disgusted." 

An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at 
school, heard me mention Colonel Walton — a most 
distinguished, religious old lady — and said to me, 
"Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak 
of that old villain or confess that you ever knew 
him," proceeding to give me his awful, blood-cur- 
dling history. 

It was mainly a figment of her fancy and 
prejudice, and I repeated it to Colonel Walton the 
next time I went to the hotel where he was then 
living — I have since learned, with a lady not his 
wife, though he was then three score and ten — and 
he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord I Don't they 
ever die!" 

Seeing every day the most distinguished public 
men of the country, and with many of them brought 
into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of 
hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have 
acquired for official station. Famiharity may not 
always breed contempt, but it is a veritable eye 
opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of a 
senator. I knew the White House too well to be 

[69] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

impressed by its architectural grandeur without and 
rather bizarre furnishments within. 

I have declaimed not a little in my time about 
the ignoble trade of politics, the collective dis.^ 
honesty of parties and the vulgarities of the self- 
exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are 
parties. Professional politics and politicians are 
probably neither worse nor better — barring their 
pretensions — than other lines of human endeavor. 
The plaj'- actor must be agreeable on the stage of 
the playhouse; the politician on the highways and 
the hustings, which constitute his playliouse — all 
the world a stage — neither to be seriously blamed 
for the dissimulation which, being an asset, be- 
comes, as it were, a second nature. 

The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have 
saved the Union and averted the War of Sections 
were on either side professional politicians, with 
here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic 
man, whose admonitions were not heeded by the 
people ranging on opposing sides of party lines. 
The two most potential of the party leaders were 
Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. The South might 
[70] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

have seen and known that the one hope of the in- 
stitution of slavery lay in the Union. However it 
ended, disunion led to abolition. The world — the 
whole trend of modern thought — was set against 
slavery. But politics, based on party feeling, is a 
game of blindman's buff. And then — here I show 
myself a son of Scotland — there is a destiny. 
"What is to be," says the predestinarian Mother 
Goose, "will be, though it never come to pass." 

That was surely the logic of the irrepressible con- 
flict — only it did come to pass — and for four years 
millions of people, the most homogeneous, practical 
and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over a 
quiddity; both devoted to liberty, order and law, 
neither seeking any real change in the character of 
its organic contract. 

Human nature remains ever the same. These 
days are very like those days. We have had fifty 
years of a restored Union. The sectional fires 
have quite gone out. Yet behold the schemes of 
revolution claiming the regenerative. JNIost of 
them call themselves the "uplift !" 

Let us agree at once that all government is more 
or less a failure; society as fraudulent as the satir- 
ists describe it; yet, when we turn to the uplift — 

[71] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

particularly the professional uplift — what do we 
find but the same old tunes, hypocrisy and empiri- 
cism posing as "friends of the people," preaching 
the pussy gospel of "sweetness and light?" 

"Words, words, words," says Hamlet. Even as 
veteran writers for the press have come through 
disheartening experience to a realizing sense of the 
futility of printer's ink must our academic pundits 
begin to suspect the futility of art and letters. 
Words however cleverly writ on paper are after 
all but words. "In a nation of blind men," we are 
told, ^'the one-eyed man is king." In a nation of 
undiscriminating voters the noise of the agitator is 
apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We have 
been teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; 
and as a consequence — the rule of numbers the 
law of the land, partyism in the saddle — legisla- 
tion, state and Federal, becomes largelj^ a matter 
of riding to hounds and horns. All this, which 
was true in the fifties, is true to-day. 

Under the pretense of "liberalizing" the Gov- 
ernment the politicians are sacrificing its organic 
character to whimsical experimentation; its checks 
and balances wisely designed to promote and pro- 
tect liberty are being loosened by schemes of re- 
[72] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

form more or less visionary; while nowhere do we 
find inteUigence enlightened by experience, and 
conviction supported by self-control, interposing 
to save the representative system of the Constitu- 
tion from the onward march of the proletariat. 

One cynic tells us that "A statesman is a politi- 
cian who is dead," and another cynic varies the 
epigram to read "A politician out of a job." Pa- 
triotism cries "God give us men," but the parties 
say "Give us votes and offices," and Congress pro- 
ceeds to create a commission. Thus responsibilities 
are shirked and places are multiphed. 

Assuming, since many do, that the life of nations 
is mortal even as is the life of man — in all things 
of growth and decline assimilating — has not our 
world reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing 
for a moment may it not be about to take the down- 
ward course into another abyss of collapse and 
oblivion ? 

The miracles of electricity the last word of 
science, what is left for man to do? With wireless 
telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile annihi- 
lating time and space, what else? Turning from the 
material to the ethical it seems of the very nature 
of the human species to meddle and muddle. On 

[73] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

every hand we see the organization of societ^'es for 
making men and women over again according to 
certain fantastic images existing in the minds of 
the promoters. "Mon Dieu!'" exclaimed the visit- 
ing Frenchman. "Fifty rehgions and only one 
soup !" Since then both the soups and the religions 
have multiplied until there is scarce a culinary or 
moral conception which has not some sect or club to 
represent it. The uplift is the keynote of these. 



[74] 



CHAPTER THE THIRD 

THE INAUGURATION OF LINCOLN — I QUIT WASHING- 
TON AND EETURN TO TENNESSEE A RUN- 
ABOUT WITH FORREST THROUGH THE FEDEIUVL 

LINES AND A DANGEROUS AD\TENTURE GOOD 

LUCK AT MEMPHIS 



IT MAY have been Louis the Fifteenth, or it 
may have been ^ladame de Pompadour, who 
said, "After me the dekige;" but whichever it was, 
very much that thought was in Mr. Buchanan's 
mind in 1861 as the time for his exit from the White 
House approached. At the North there had been 
a pohtical ground-swell; at the South, secession, 
half accomplished by the Gulf States, yawned in 
the Border States. Curiously enough, very few be- 
lieved that war was imminent. 

As a reporter for the States I met Mr. Lincoln 
immediately on his arrival in Washington. He 
came in unexpectedly ahead of the hour announced, 
to escape, as was given out, a well-laid plan to 

[T5] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

assassinate him as he passed through Baltimore. I 
did not believe at the time, and I do not believe 
now, that there was any real ground for this ap- 
prehension. 

All through that winter there had been a deal of 
wild talk. One story had it that Mr. Buchanan was 
to be kidnapped and made off with so that Vice 
President Breckenridge might succeed and, acting 
as de facto President, throw the country into con- 
fusion and revolution, defeating the inauguration 
of Lincoln and the coming in of the Republicans. 
It was a figment of drink and fancy. There was 
never any such scheme. If there had been Breck- 
enridge would not have consented to be party to it. 
He was a man of unusual mental as well as per- 
sonal dignity and both temperamentally and in- 
tellectually a thorough conservative. 

I had been engaged by Mr. L. A. Gobright, the 
agent of what became later the Associated Press, 
to help with the report of the inauguration cere- 
monies the 4th of March, 1861, and in the discharge 
of this duty I kept as close to Mr. Lincoln as I 
cduld get, follomng after him from the senate 
chamber to the east portico of the capitol and stand- 
[76] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ing by his side whilst he dehvered his inaugural 
address. 

Perhaps I shall not be deemed prolix if I dwell 
with some particularity upon an occasion so his- 
toric. I had first encountered the newly elected 
President the afternoon of the day in the early 
morning of which he had arrived in Washington. 
It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the capitol 
under the escort of Mr. Seward, and among the 
rest I was presented to him. His appearance did 
not impress me as fantastically as it had impressed 
some others. I was familiar with the Western 
type, and whilst Mr. Lincoln was not an Adonis, 
even after prairie ideals, there was about him a 
dignity that conmianded respect. 

I met him again the next Monday forenoon in 
his apartment at Willard's Hotel as he was pre- 
paring to start to his inauguration, and was struck 
by his unaffected kindness, for I came with a mat- 
ter requiring his attention. This was, in point of 
fact, to get from him a copy of the inauguration 
speech for the Associated Press. I turned it over 
to Ben Perley Poore, who, like myself, was assist- 
ing Mr. Gobright. The President that was about 
to be seemed entirely self-possessed; not a sign of 

[77] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

nervousness, and very obliging. As I have said, I 
accompanied the cortege that passed from the sen- 
ate chamber to the east portico. When Mr. Lin- 
coln removed his hat to face the vast throng in 
front and below, I extended my hand to take it, 
but Judge Douglas, just behind me, reached over 
my outstretched arm and received it, holding it 
during the delivery of the address. I stood just 
near enough the speaker's elbow not to obstruct 
any gestures he might make, though he made but 
few; and then I began to get a suspicion of the 
power of the man. 

He delivered that inaugural address as if he had 
been delivering inaugural addresses all his life. 
Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced the coming 
of a man, of a leader of men; and in its tone and 
style the gentlemen whom he had invited to become 
members of his political family — each of whom 
thought himself a bigger man than his chief — might 
have heard the voice and seen the hand of one born 
to rule. Whether they did or not, they very soon 
ascertained the fact. From the hour Abraham Lin- 
coln crossed the threshold of the White House to 
the hour he went thence to his death, there was not 
a moment when he did not dominate the pohtical 
[78] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and military situation and his official subordinates. 
The idea that he was overtopped at any time by 
anybody is contradicted by all that actually hap- 
pened. 

I was a young Democrat and of course not in 
sympathy with Mr. Lincoln or his opinions. Judge 
Douglas, however, had taken the edge off my 
hostility. He had said to me upon his return in 
triumph to Washington after the famous Illinois 
campaign of 1868 : "Lincoln is a good man; in fact, 
a great man, and by far the ablest debater I have 
ever met," and now the newcomer began to verify 
this opinion both in his private conversation and in 
his public attitude. 

i 

1 

u 

I had been an undoubting Union boy. Neither 
then nor afterward could I be fairly classified as a 
Secessionist. Circumstance rather than convic- 
tion or predilection threw me into the Confederate 
service, and, being in, I went through with it. 

The secession leaders I held in distrust; especially 
Yancey, Mason, Slidell, Benjamin and Iverson, 
Jefferson Davis and Isham G. Harris were not 
favorites of mine. Later along I came into f amihar 

[79] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

association with most of them, and relations were 
estabhshed which may be described as confidential 
and affectionate. Lamar and I were brought to- 
gether oddly enough in 1869 by Carl Schurz, and 
thenceforward we were the most devoted friends. 
Harris and I fell together in 1862 in the field, first 
with Forrest and later with Johnston and Hood, 
and we remained as brothers to the end, when he 
closed a great career in the upper house of Con- 
gress, and by Republican votes, though he was a 
Democrat, as president of the Senate. 

He continued in the Governorship of Tennessee 
through the war. He at no time lost touch with 
the Tennessee trooj)S, and though not always in the 
field, never missed a forward movement. In 
the early spring of 1864, just before the famous 
Johnston- Sherman campaign opened, General 
Johnston asked him to go around among the boys 
and "stir 'em up a bit." The Governor invited me 
to ride with him. Together we visited every sector 
in the army. Threading the woods of North 
Georgia on this round, if I heard it once I heard it 
fifty times shouted from a distant clearing: "Here 
comes Gov-ner Harris, fellows; g'wine to be a 
fight." His appearance at the front had always 
[80] 





JOHN BELL OF TEXXESSEE IX 1860 PRESIDEXTIAL 

CANDIDATE "UNIOX PARTY'" "EELL AXU EVEREIT" TICKET 



"MARSE HENRY" 

preceded and been long ago taken as a signal for 
battle. 

JNIy being a Washington correspondent of the 

Philadelphia Press and having lived since childhood 
at Willard's Hotel, where the Camerons also lived, 
will furnish the key to my becoming an actual and 
active rebel. A few days after the inauguration of 
Mr. Lincoln, Colonel Forney came to my quarters 
and, having passed the time of day, said: "The 
Secretary of War wishes you to be at the depart- 
ment to-morrow morning as near nine o'clock as 
you can make it." 

"What does he want, Colonel Forney?" I asked. 

"He is going to offer you the position of private 
secretary to the Secretary of War, with the rank 
of lieutenant colonel, and I am very desirous that 
you accept it." 

He went away leaving me rather upset. I did 
not sleep very soundly that night. "So," I argued 
to myself, "it has come to this, that Forney and 
Cameron, lifelong enemies, have made friends and 
are going to rob the Government — one clerk of the 
House, the other Secretary of War — and I, a 
mutual choice, am to be the confidential middle 

[81] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

man." I still had a home in Tennessee and I rose 
from my bed, resolved to go there. 

I did not keep the proposed appointment for 
next day. As soon as I could make arrangements 
I quitted Washington and went to Tennessee, still 
unchanged in my preconceptions. I may add, since 
they were verified by events, that I have not modi- 
fied them from that day to this. 

I could not wholly believe with either extreme. 
I had perpetrated no wrong, but in my small way 
had done my best for the Union and against seces- 
sion. I would go back to my books and my literary 
ambitions and let the storm blow over. It could 
not last very long; the odds against the South were 
too great. Vain hope! As well expect a chip on 
the surface of the ocean to lie quiet as a lad of 
twenty-one in those days to keep out of one or the 
other camp. On reaching home I found myself 
alone. The boys were all gone to the front. The 
girls were — well, they were all crazy. My native 
country was about to be invaded. Propinquity. 
Sympathy. So, casting opinions to the winds in I 
went on feeling. And that is how I became a rebel, 
a case of "first endure and then embrace," because 
I soon got to be a pretty good rebel and went the 
[82] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

limit, changing my coat as it were, though not my 
better judgment, for with a gray jacket on my 
back and ready to do or die, I retained my behef 
that secession was treason, that disunion was the 
height of folly and that the South was bound to go 
down in the unequal strife. 

I think now, as an academic proposition, that, in 
the doctrine of secession, the secession leaders had 
a debatable, if not a logical case; but I also think 
that if the Gulf States had been allowed to go out 
by tacit consent they would very soon have been 
back again seeking readmission to the Union. 

Man proposes and God disposes. The ways of 
Deity to man are indeed past finding out. Why, the 
long and dreadful struggle of a kindred people, 
the awful bloodshed and havoc of four weary years, 
leaving us at the close measurably where we were 
at the beginning, is one of the mysteries which 
should prove to us that there is a world hereafter, 
since no great creative principle could produce one 
with so dire, with so short a span and nothing be- 
yond. 

Ill 

The change of parties wrought by the presiden- 
tial election of 1860 and completed by the coming 

[83] 



''MARSE HENRY" 

in of the Republicans in 1861 was indeed revolu- 
tionary. When Mr. Lincoln had finished his 
inaugural address and the crowd on the east portico 
began to disperse, I reentered the rotunda between 
JNIr. Reverdy Johnson, of IMaryland, and Mr. John 
Bell, of Tennessee, two old friends of my family, 
and for a little we sat upon a bench, they discussing 
the speech we had just heard. 

Both were sure there would be no war. All 
would be well, they thought, each speaking kindly 
of Mr. Lincoln. They were among the most 
eminent men of the time, I a boy of twenty-one; 
but to me war seemed a certainty. Recalling the 
episode, I have often realized how the intuitions of 
youth outwit the wisdom and baffle the experience 
of age. 

I at once resigned my snug sinecure in the In- 
terior Department and, closing my accounts of 
every sort, was presently ready to turn my back 
upon Washington and seek adventures elsewhere. 

They met me halfway and came in plenty. I 
tried staff duty with General Polk, who was mak- 
ing an expedition into Western Kentucky. In a 
few weeks illness drove me into Nashville, where I 
passed the next winter in desultory newspaper 
[84] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

work. Then Nashville fell, and, as I was making 
my way out of town afoot and trudging the ^lur- 
freesboro pike, Forrest, with his squadron just es- 
caped from Fort Donelson, came thundering by, 
and I leaped into an empty saddle. A few days 
later Forrest, promoted to brigadier general, at- 
tached me to his staff, and the next six months it 
was mainly guerilla service, very much to my liking. 
But Fate, if not Nature, had decided that I was a 
better writer than fighter, and the Bank of Ten- 
nessee having bought a newspaper outfit at Chatta- 
nooga, I was sent there to edit The Rebel — my own 
naming — established as the organ of the Tennessee 
state government. I made it the organ of the 
army. 

It is not the purpose of these pages to retell the 
well-known story of the war. jNIy life became a 
series of ups and downs — mainly downs — the word 
being from day to day to fire and fall back; in 

the Johnston- Sherman campaign, I served as 
chief of scouts; then as an aid to General Hood 
through the siege of Atlanta, sharing the beginning 
of the chapter of disasters that befell that gallant 
soldier and his arm3^ I was spared the last and 
worst of these by a curious piece of special duty, 

[85] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

taking me elsewhere, to which I was assigned in 
the autumn of 1864 by the Confederate govern- 
ment. 

This involved a foreign journey. It was no 
less than to go to England to sell to Enghsh buy- 
ers some hundred thousand bales of designated cot- 
ton to be thus rescued from spoilation, acting under 
the supervision and indeed the orders of the Con- 
federate fiscal agency at Liverpool. 

Of course I was ripe for this; but it proved a 
bigger job than I had conceived or di-eamed. The 
initial step was to get out of the country. But 
how? That was the question. To run Ihe blockade 
had been easy enough a few months earlier. All 
our ports were now sealed by Federal cruisers and 
gunboats. There was nothing for it but to slip 
through the North and to get either a New York or 
a Canadian boat. Tliis involved chances and dis- 
guises. 

ly 

In West Tennessee, not far from Memphis, 
lived an aunt of mine. Thither I repaired. My 
plan was to get on a Mississippi steamer calling at 
one of the landings for wood. This proved im- 
practicable. I wandered many days and nights, 
[86] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

rather ill mounted, in search of some kind — any 
kind — of exit, when one afternoon, quite worn out, 
I sat by a log heap in a comfortable farmhouse. It 
seemed that I was at the end of my tether; I did 
not know what to do. 

Presently there was an arrival — a brisk gentle- 
man right out of Memphis, which I then learned 
was only ten miles distant — bringing with him a 
morning paper. In this I saw appended to various 
army orders the name of "N. B. Dana, General 
Commanding." 

That set me to thinking. Was not Dana the 
name of a certain captain, a stepson of Congress- 
man Peaslee, of New Hampshire, who had hved 
with us at Willard's Hotel — and were there not 
two children, Charley and Mamie, and a dear little 

mother, and I had been listening to the talk 

of the newcomer. He was a licensed cotton buyer 
with a pass to come and go at will through the 
lines, and was returning next day. 

*'I want to get into ^lemphis — I am a nephew of 
Mrs. General Dana. Can you take me in?" I said 
to this person. 

After some hesitation he consented to try, it 

[87] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

being agreed that my mount and outfit should be 
his if he got me through ; no trade if he failed. 

Clearly the way ahead was brightening. I soon 
ascertained that I was with friends, loyal Con- 
federates. Then I told them who I was, and all 
became excitement for the next day's adventure. 

We drove down to the Federal outpost. Cren- 
shaw — that was the name of the cotton buyer — 
showed his pass to the officer in command, who 
then turned to me. "Captain," I said, "I have no 
pass, but I am a nephew of Mrs. General Dana. 
Can you not pass me in without a pass?" He was 
very polite. It was a chain picket, he said; his 
orders were very strict, and so on. 

"Well," I said, "suppose I were a member of 
your own command and were run in here by 
guerillas. What do you think would it be your 
duty to do?" 

"In that case," he answered, "I should send you 
to headquarters with a guard." 

"Good!" said I. "Can't you send me to head- 
quarters with a guard?" 

He thought a moment. Then he called a cavalry- 
man from the outpost. 
[88] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

"Britton," he said, "show this gentleman in to 
General Dana's headquarters." 

Crenshaw lashed his horse and away we went. 
*'That boy thinks he is a guide, not a guard," said 
he. "You are all right. We can easily get rid of 
hun." 

This proved true. We stopped by a saloon and 
bought a bottle of whisky. When we reached head- 
quarters the lad said, "Do you gentlemen want me 
any more?" We did not. Then we gave him the 
bottle of whisky and he disappeared round the cor- 
ner. "Now you are safe," said Crenshaw. "Make 
tracks." 

But as I turned away and out of sight I began 
to consider the situation. Suppose that picket on 
the outpost reported to the provost marshal general 
that he had passed a relative of Mrs. Dana? What 
then? Provost guard. Drumhead court-martial. 
Shot at daylight. It seemed best to play out the 
hand as I had dealt it. After all, I could make a 
case if I faced it out. 

The guard at the door refused me access to Gen- 
eral Dana. Driven by a nearby hackman to the 
General's residence, and, boldly asking for Mrs. 
Dana, I was more successful. I mtroduced myself 

[89] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

as a teacher of music seeking to return to my 
friends in the North, working in a word about the 
old Washington days, not forgetting "Charley" 
and "Mamie." The dear little woman was heartily 
responsive. Both were there, including a pretty 
girl from Philadelphia, and she called them down. 
"Here is your old friend, Henry Waterman," she 
joyfully exclaimed. Then guests began to arrive. 
It was a reception evening. My hope fell. Some 
one would surely recognize me. Presently a gen- 
tleman entered, and Mrs. Dana said: "Colonel Mee- 
han, this is my particular friend, Henry Waterman, 
who has been teaching music out in the country, 
and wants to go up the river. You will give him a 
pass, I am sure." It was the provost marshal, who 
answered, "certainly." Now was my time for dis- 
appearing. But Mrs. Dana would not listen to this. 
General Dana would never forgive her if she let 
me go. Besides, there was to be a supper and a 
dance. I sat down again very much disconcerted. 
The situation was becoming awkward. Then Mrs. 
Dana spoke. "You say you have been teaching 
music. What is your instrument?" Saved! "The 
piano," I answered. The girls escorted me to the 
rear drawing-room. It was a new Steinway Grand, 
[90] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

just set up, and I played for my life. If the black 
bombazine covering my gray uniform did not 
break, all would be well. I was having a delight- 
fully good time, the girls on either hand, when 
Mrs. Dana, still enthusiastic, ran in and said, "Gen- 
eral Dana is here. Remembers you perfectly. 
Come and see him." 

He stood by a table, tall, sardonic, and as I ap- 
proached he put out his hand and said: "You have 
grown a bit, Henry, my boy, since I saw you last. 
How did you leave my friend Forrest?" 

I was about making some awkward reply, when, 
the room already filling up, he said: 

"We have some friends for supper. I am glad 
you are here. ISIamie, my daughter, take Mr. Wat- 
terson to the table!" 

Lord! That supper! Canvasback! Terrapin! 
Champagne! The general had seated me at his 
right. Somewhere toward the close those expres- 
sive gray eyes looked at me keenly, and across his 
wine glass he said: 

"I think I understand this. You want to get up 
the river. You want to see your mother. Have 
you money enough to carry you through? If you 

[91] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

have not don't hesitate, for whatever you need I 
will gladly let j^ou have." 

I thanked him. I had quite enough. All was 
well. We had more music and some dancing. At 
a late hour he called the provost marshal. 

"Meehan," said he, "take this dangerous young 
rebel round to the hotel, register him as Smith, 
Brown, or something, and send him with a pass up 
the river by the first steamer." I was in luck, was 
I not? 

But I made no impression on those girls. Many 
years after, meeting Mamie Dana, as the wife of an 
army officer at Fortress Monroe, I related the 
Memphis incident. She did not in the least recall it. 



I had one other adventure during the war that 
may be worth telling. It was in 1862. Forrest 
took it into his inexperienced fighting head to make 
a cavalry attack upon a Federal stockade, and, re- 
pulsed with considerable loss, the command had to 
disperse — there were not more than two hundred 
of us — in order to escape capture by the newly- 
arrived reinforcements that swarmed about. We 
[92] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

were to rendezvous later at a certain point. Hav- 
ing some time to spare, and being near the family 
homestead at Beech Grove, I put in there. 

It was midnight when I reached my destination. 
I had been erroneously informed that the Union 
Army was on the retreat — quite gone from the 
neighborhood; and next day, believing the coast 
was clear, I donned a summer suit and with a neigh- 
bor boy who had been wounded at Shiloh and in- 
valided home, rode over to visit some young ladies. 
We had scarcely been welcomed and were taking a 
glass of wine when, looking across the lawn, we 
saw that the place was being surrounded by a body 
of blue-coats. The story of their departure had 
been a mistake. They were not all gone. 

There was no chance of escape. We were placed 
in a hollow square and marched across country into 
camp. Before we got there I had ascertained that 
they were Indianians, and I was further led rightly 
to surmise what we called in 1860 Douglas Demo- 
crats. 

My companion, a husky fellow, who looked and 
was every inch a soldier, was first questioned by the 
colonel in command. His examination was brief. 
He said he was as good a rebel as lived, that he was 

' [93] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

only waiting for his wound to heal to get back into 
the Confederate Ai-my, and that if they wanted to 
hang him for a spy to go ahead. 

I was agha*st. It was not he that was in danger 
of hanging, but myself, a soldier in citizen's apparel 
within the enemy's lines. The colonel turned to 
me. With what I took for a sneer he said: 

"I suppose you are a good Union man?" This 
offered me a chance. 

"That depends upon what you call a good Union 
man," I answered. "I used to be a very good 
Union man — a Douglas Democrat — and I am not 
conscious of having changed my political opinions." 

That softened him and we had an old-fashioned, 
friendly talk about the situation, in which I kept 
the Douglas Democratic end of it well to the fore. 
He, too, had been a Douglas Democrat. I soon 
saw that it was my companion and not myself whom 
they were after. Presently Colonel Shook, that 
being the commandant's name, went into the ad- 
jacent stockade and the boys about began to be 
hearty and sympathetic. I made them a regular 
Douglas Democratic speech. They brought some 
"red licker" and I asked for some sugar for a toddy, 
not failing to cite the famihar Sut Lovingood say- 
[94] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

in^that "there were about seventeen round the door 
who said they'd take sugar in their'n." The drink 
warmed me to my work, making me quicker, if not 
bolder, in invention. Then the colonel not reap- 
pearing as soon as I hoped he would, for all along 
my fear was the wires, I went to him. 

"Colonel Shook," I said, "you need not bother 
about this friend of mine. He has no real idea of 
returning to the Confederate service. He is teach- 
ing school over here at Beech Grove and engaged 
to be married to one of the — girls. If you carry 
him off a prisoner he will be exchanged back into 
the fighting line, and we make nothing by it. There 

is a hot luncheon waiting for us at the 's. Leave 

him to me and I will be answerable." Then I left 
him. 

Directly he came out and said: "I may be doing 
VTrong, and don't feel entirely sure of my ground, 
but I am going to let you gentlemen go." 

We thanked him and made off amid the cheery 
good-bys of the assembled blue-coats. 

No lunch for us. We got to our horses, rode 
away, and that night I was at our rendezvous to 
tell the tale to those of my comrades who had ar- 
rived before me. 

[95] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Colonel Shook and I met after the war at a 
Grand Army reunion where I was billed to speak 
and to which he introduced me, relating the inci- 
dent and saying, among other things: "I do beheve 
that when he told me near Wartrace that day 
twenty years ago that he was a good Union man he 
told at least half the truth." 



[96] 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

I GO TO LONDON AM INTRODUCED TO A NOTABLE SET 

HUXLEY^ SPENCER^ MILL AND TYNDALL AE- 

TEMUS WARD COMES TO TOWN ^THE SAVAGE 

CLUB. 

I 

THE fall of Atlanta after a siege of nearly 
two months was, in the opinion of thoughtful 
people, the sure precursor of the fall of the doomed 
Confederacy. I had an affectionate regard for 
General Hood, but it was my belief that neither 
he nor any other soldier could save the day, and 
being out of commission and having no mind for 
what I conceived aimless campaigning through an- 
other winter — especially an advance into Tennes- 
see upon Nashville — I wrote to an old friend of 
mine, who owned the ^lontgomery Mail, asking 
for a job. He answered that if I would come right 
along and take the editorship of the paper he would 
make me a present of half of it — a proposal so op- 
portune and tempting that forty-eight hours later 
saw me in the capital of Alabama. 

[97] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

I was accompanied by my fidus Achates, Albert 
Roberts. The morning after our arrival, by chance 
I came across a printed line which advertised a room 
and board for two "single gentlemen," with the 
curious affix for those times, "references will be 
given and required." This latter caught me. 
When I rang the visitors' bell of a pretty dwell- 
ing upon one of the nearby streets a distinguished 
gentleman in uniform came to the door, and, ac- 
quainted with my business, he said, "Ah, that is an 
affair of my wife," and invited me within. 

He was obviously English. Presently there ap- 
peared a beautiful lady, likewise English and as 
obviously a gentlewoman, and an hour later my 
friend Roberts and I moved in. The incident 
proved in many ways fateful. The military gen- 
tleman proved to be Doctor Scott, the post sur- 
geon. He was, when we came to know him, the 
most interesting of men, a son of that Captain 
Scott who commanded Byron's flagship at Misso- 
longhi in 1823 ; had as a lad attended the poet and he 
in his last illness and been in at the death, seeing 
the club foot when the body was prepared for burial. 
His wife was adorable. There were two girls and 
two boys. To make a long story short, Albert Rob- 
[98] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

erts married one of the daughters, his brother the 
other ; the lads growing up to be successful and dis- 
tinguished men — one a naval admiral, the other a 
railway president. When, just after the war, I 
was going abroad, Mrs. Scott said: "I have a 
brother living in London to whom I will be glad 

to give you a letter." 

n 

Upon the deck of the steamer bound from New 
York to London direct, as we, my wife and I newly 
married, were taking a last look at the receding 
American shore, there appeared a gentleman who 
seemed by the cut of his jib startlingly French. We 
had under our escort a French governess returning 
to Paris. In a twinkle she and this gentleman had 
struck up an acquaintance, and much to my dis- 
pleasure she introduced him to me as "Monsieur 
Mahoney." I was somewhat mollified when later 
we were made acquainted with Madame Mahoney. 

I was not at all preconceived in his favor, nor did 
Monsieur Mahoney, upon nearer approach, con- 
ciliate my simple taste. In person, manners and 
apparel he was quite beyond me. Mrs. Mahoney, 
however, as we soon called her, was a dear, whole- 
souled, traveled, unaffected New England woman. 

[99] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

But Monsieur! Lord! There was no holding him 
at arm's length. He brooked not resistance. I was 
wearing a full beard. He said it would never do, 
carried me perforce below, and cut it as I have worn 
it ever since. The day before we were to dock he 
took me aside and said: 

"Mee young friend" — he had a brogue which 
thirty years in Algiers, where he had been consul, 
and a dozen in Paris as a gentleman of leisure, had 
not wholly spoiled — "Mee young friend, I observe 
that you are shy of strangers, but my wife and I 
have taken a shine to you and the 'Princess'," as 
he called Mrs. Watterson, "and if you will allow 
us, we can be of some sarvis to you when we get to 
town." 

Certainly there was no help for it. I was too ill 
of the long crossing to oppose him. At Blackwall 
we took the High Level for Fenchurch Street, at 
Fenchurch Street a cab for the West End — Mr. 
Mahoney bossing the job — and finally, in most 
comfortable and inexpensive lodgings, we were 
settled in Jermyn Street. The Mahoneys were 
visiting Lady Elmore, widow of a famous surgeon 
and mother of the President of the Royal Academy. 

[100] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Thus we were introduced to quite a distinguished 
artistic set. 

It was great. It was glorious. At last we were 
in London — the dream of my literary ambitions. I 
have since lived much in this wondrous city and in 
many parts of it between Hyde Park Corner, the 
heart of ]May Fair, to the east end of Bloomsbury 
under the very sound of Bow Bells. All the way as 
it were from Tyburn Tree that was, and the Mar- 
ble Arch that is, to Charing Cross and the Hay 
Market. This were not to mention casual sojourns 
along Piccadilly and the Strand. 

In childhood I was obsessed by the immensity, 
the atmosphere and the mystery of London. Its 
nomenclature embedded itself in my fancy ; Houns- 
ditch and Shoreditch, Billingsgate and Blackfriars ; 
Bishopgate, within, and Bishopgate, without; 
Threadneedle Street and Wapping-Old-Stairs; 
the Inns of Court where Jarndyce struggled with 
Jarndyce, and the taverns where the Mark Tap- 
leys, the Captain Costigans and the Dolly Var- 
dens consorted. 

Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to 
know and love it, and those that may be called its 
dramatis personae, especially its tatterdemalions, 

[101] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick 
Turpin and Jonathan Wild the Great. Inevitably 
I sought their haunts — and they were not all gone 
in those days; the Bull-and-Gate in Holborn, 
whither Mr. Tom Jones repaired on his arrival in 
town, and the White Hart Tavern, where Mr. 
Pickwick fell in with Mr. Sam Weller; the regions 
about Leicester Fields and Russell Square sacred 
to the memory of Captain Booth and the lovely 
Amelia and Becky Sharp; where Garrick drank 
tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippled 
with Sir Richard Steele. There was yet a Pump 
Court, and many places along Oxford Street where 
Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent 
Garden and Drury Lane. Evans' Coffee House, 
or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, and The Cock 
and the Cheshire Cheese were near at hand for re- 
freshment in the agreeable society of Daniel Defoe 
and Joseph Addison, with Oliver Goldsmith and 
Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink 
ghostly glasses amid the punch fumes and tobacco 
smoke. In short I knew London when it was still 
Old London — the knowledge of Temple Bar and 
Cheapside — before the vandal horde of progress 
[102] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and the pickaxe of the builder had got in their 

nefarious work. 

Ill 

Not long after we began our sojourn in London, 
I recurred — by chance, I am ashamed to say — to 
Mrs, Scott's letter of introduction to her brother. 
The address read "^Ir. Thomas H. Huxley, School 
of INIines, Jermyn Street." Why, it was but two or 
three blocks away, and being so near I called, not 
knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might 
be. 

I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. 
The gentleman who met me was exceedingly hand- 
some and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially 
and we had some talk about his relatives in Amer- 
ica. Of course my wife and I were invited at once 
to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There was no 
one to tell me about Huxley, or in what way he 
might be connected with the School of Mines. 

It was a good dinner. There sat at table a 
gentleman by the name of Tyndall and another by 
the name of Mill — of neither I had ever heard — but 
there was still another of the name of Spencer, 
whom I fancied must be a literary man, for I re- 
called having reviewed a clever book on Education 



"MARSE HENRY" 

some four years agone by a writer of that name; 
a certain Herbert Spencer, whom I rightly judged 
might he be. 

The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner in- 
deed — the Huxleys, I took it, must be well to do — 
the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however, 
I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer 
said he loved music and wished to hear Mrs. Wat- 
terson sing, especially Longfellow's Rainy Day, 
and left the others of us— Huxley, Mill, Tyndall 
and myself — at table. Finding them a little off on 
the Irish question as well as American affairs, I set 
them right as to both with much particularity and 
a great deal of satisfaction to myself. 

Whatever Huxley's occupation, it turned out 
that he had at least one book-publishing acquaint- 
ance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he intro- 
duced me next day, for I had brought with me a 
novel — the great American romance — too good to 
be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or Boston, 
but to appear simultaneously in England and the 
United States, to be translated, of course, into 
French, Itahan and German. This was actually 
accepted. It was held for final revision. 

We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, 
[104] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

however, called me suddenly home. Politics and 
journalism knocked literature sky high, and the 
novel — it was entitled "One Story's Good Till An- 
other Is Told" — was laid by and quite forgotten. 
Some twenty years later, at a moment when I was 
being lashed from one end of the hne to the other, 
my wife said : 

"Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to 
literature." She had preserved the old manuscript, 
two thousand pages of it. 

"Fetch it," I said. 

She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! 
The stuff it was! Not a gleam, never a radiance. 
I had been teaching myself to write — I had been 
writing for the English market — perpendicular! 
The Lord has surely been good to me. If the 
"boys" had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been 
lost indeed! 

IV 

Yea, verily we were in London. Presently 
Artemus Ward and "the show" arrived in town. 
He took a lodging over an apothecary's just across 
the way from Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where 
he was to lecture. We had been the best of friends, 
were near of an age, and only round-the-corner 

[105] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

apart we became from the first inseparable. I in- 
troduced him to the distinguished scientific set into 
which chance had thrown me, and he introduced 
me to a very different set that made a revel of life 
at the Savage Club. 

I find by reference to some notes jotted down at 
the time that the last I saw of him was the evening 
of the 21st of December, 1866. He had dined with 
my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur 
Sketchley, who had dropped in after dinner, he 
bade us good-by and went for his nightly grind, as 
he called it. We were booked to take our depar- 
ture the next morning. His condition was pitiable. 
He was too feeble to walk alone, and was con- 
tinually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon 
had forbidden the use of wine or liquor of any sort. 
Instead he drank quantities of water, eating little 
and taking no exercise at all. Nevertheless, he 
stuck to his lecture and contrived to keep up ap- 
pearances before the crowds that flocked to hear 
him, and even in London his critical state of health 
was not suspected. 

Early in September, when I had parted from him 
to go to Paris, I left him methodically and indus- 
triously arranging for his debut. He had brought 
[106] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

some letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was 
already making progress toward what might be 
called the interior circles of the press, which are so 
essential to the success of a newcomer in London. 
Charles Reade and Andrew Haliday became zeal- 
ous friends. It was to the latter that he owed his 
introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon 
made himself at home. His manners, even his 
voice, were half English, albeit he possessed a most 
engaging disposition — a ready tact and keen dis- 
cernment, very un-English, — and these won him 
an efficient corps of claquers and backers through- 
out the newspapers and periodicals of the metrop- 
olis. Thus his success was assured from the first. 
The raw November evening when he opened at 
Egyptian Hall the room was crowded with an 
audience of literary men and women, great and 
small, from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the 
trumpeters and reporters of the morning papers. 
The next day most of these contained glowing ac- 
counts. The Times was silent, but four days later 
The Thunderer, seeing how the wind blew, came 
out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, 
each evening proved a kind of ovation. Seats were 
engaged for a week in advance. Up and down 

[107] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James 
Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the 
kingdom were parked night after night; and the 
evening of the 21st of December, six weeks after, 
there was no falling off. The success was com- 
plete. As to an American, London had never seen 
the like. 

All this while the poor author of the sport was 
slowly dying. The demands upon his animal spirits 
at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue of "getting 
himself up to it," the "damnable iteration" of the 
lecture itself, wore him out. George, his valet, 
whom he had brought from America, had finally to 
lift him about his bedroom like a child. His quar- 
ters in Picadilly, as I have said, were just opposite 
the Hall, but he could not go backward and for- 
ward without assistance. It was painful in the ex- 
treme to see the man who was undergoing tortures 
behind the curtain step lightly before the audience 
amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an 
hour sustain the part of jester, tossing his cap and 
jingling his bells, a painted death's head, for he 
had to rouge his face to hide the pallor. 

His buoyancy forsook him. He was occasionally 
nervous and fretful. The fog, he declared, felt 
[108] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

like a winding sheet, enwTapping and strangling 
him. At one of his entertainments he made a grim, 
serio-comic allusion to this. "But," cried he as he 
came off the stage, "that was not a hit, was it? 
The English are scary about death. I'll have to 
cut it out." 

He had become a contributor to Punch, a lucky 
rather than smart business stroke, for it was not of 
his own initiation. He did not continue his con- 
tributions after he began to appear before the pub- 
lic, and the discontinuance was made the occasion of 
some ill-natured remarks in certain American 
papers, which very much wounded him. They 
were largely circulated and credited at the time, the 
charge being that Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, 
the publishers of the English charivari, had broken 
with him because the English would not have him. 
The truth is that their original proposal was made 
to him, not by him to them, the price named 
being fifteen guineas a letter. He asked permis- 
sion to duplicate the arrangement with some New 
York periodical, so as to secure an American copy- 
right. This they refused. I read the correspond- 
ence at the time. "Our aim," they said, "in mak- 

[109] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ing the engagement, had reference to our own cir- 
culation in the United States, which exceeds twenty- 
seven thousand weekly." 

I suggested to Artemus that he enter his book, 
"Artemus Ward in London," in advance, and he 
did write to Oakey Hall, his New York lawyer, to 
that effect. Before he received an answer from 
Hall he got Carleton's advertisement announcing 
the book. Considering this a piratical design on the 
part of Carleton, he addressed that enterprising 
pubhsher a savage letter, but the matter was 
ultimately cleared up to his satisfaction, for he 
said just before we parted: "It was all a mistake 
about Carleton. I did him an injustice and mean 
to ask his pardon. He has behaved very hand- 
somely to me." Then the letters reappeared in 
Punch. 

V 

Whatever may be thought of them on this side 
of the Atlantic, their success in England was un- 
deniable. They were more talked about than any 
current literary matter; never a club gathering or 
dinner party at which they were not discussed. 
There did seem something both audacious and 
grotesque in this ruthless Yankee poking in among 
[110] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the revered antiquities of Britain, so that the beef- 
eating British themselves could not restrain their 
laughter. They took his jokes in excellent part. 
The letters on the Tower and Chawsir were palpa- 
ble hits, and it was generally agreed that Punch had 
contained nothing better since the days of Yellow- 
plush. This opinion was not confined to the man 
in the street. It was shared by the high-brows of 
the reviews and the appreciative of society, and 
gained Artemus the entree wherever he cared to go. 
Invitations pursued him and he was even elected 
to two or three fashionable clubs. But he had a 
preference for those which were less conventional. 
His admission to the Garrick, which had been 
at first "laid over," affords an example of London 
club fastidiousness. The gentleman who proposed 
him used his pseudonym, Artemus Ward, instead 
of his own name, Charles F. Browne. I had the 
pleasure of introducing him to Mr. Alexander Mac- 
millan, the famous book publisher of Oxford and 
Cambridge, a leading member of the Garrick. We 
dined together at the Garrick clubhouse, when the 
matter was brought up and explained. The result 
was that Charles F. Browne was elected at the next 

[111] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

meeting, where Artemus Ward, had been made to 
stand aside. 

Before Christmas, Artemus received invitations 
from distinguished people, nobihty and gentry as 
well as men of letters, to spend the week-end with 
them. But he declined them all. He needed his 
vacation, he said, for rest. He had neither the 
strength nor the spirit for the season. 

Yet was he delighted with the English people 
and with English life. His was one of those re- 
ceptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome 
and sunny. In spite of his bodily pain, he enter- 
tained a lively hope of coming out of it in the 
spring, and did not realize his time condition. He 
merely said, "I have overworked myself, and must 
lay by or I shall break down altogether." He meant 
to remain in London as long as his welcome lasted, 
and when he perceived a falling off in his audience, 
would close his season and go to the continent. 
His receipts averaged about three hundred dollars 
a night, whilst his expenses were not fifty dollars. 
"This, mind you," he used to say, "is in very hard 
cash, an article altogether superior to that of my 
friend Charles Reade." 

His idea was to set aside out of his earnings 
[112] 




ARTEMAS WARD 



"MARSE HENRY" 

enough to make him independent, and then to give 
up "this mountebank business," as he called it. He 
had a great respect for scholarly culture and per- 
sonal respectability, and thought that if he could 
get time and health he might do something "in the 
genteel comedy line." He had a humorous novel 
in view, and a series of more aspiring comic essays 
than any he had attempted. 

Often he alluded to the opening for an American 
magazine, "not quite so highfalutin as the Atlantic 
nor so popular as Harper's." His mind was begin- 
ning to soar above the showman and merrymaker. 
His manners had always been captivating. Except 
for the nervous worry of ill-health, he was the kind- 
hearted, unaffected Artemus of old, loving as a 
girl and liberal as a prince. He once showed me 
his daybook in which were noted down over five 
hundred dollars lent out in small sums to indigent 
Americans. 

"Why," said I, "you will never get half of it 
back." 

"Of course not," he said, "but do you think I 
can afford to have a lot of loose fellows black- 
guarding me at home because I wouldn't let them 
have a sovereign or so over here?" 

[113] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

There was no lack of independence, however, 
about him. The benefit which he gave Mrs. Jeffer- 
son Davis in New Orleans, which was denounced 
at the North as toadying to the Rebels, proceeded 
from a wholly different motive. He took a kindly 
interest in the case because it was represented to 
him as one of suffering, and knew very well at 
the time that his bounty would meet with detrac- 
tion. 

He used to relate with gusto an interview he once 
had with Murat Halstead, who had printed a tart 
paragraph about him. He went into the office of 
the Cincinnati editor, and began in his usual jocose 
way to ask for the needful correction. Halstead 
resented the proffered familiarity, when Artemus 
told him flatly, suddenly changing front, that he 
"didn't care a d — n for the Commercial, and the 
whole establishment might go to hell." Next day 
the paper appeared with a handsome amende, and 
the two became excellent friends. "I have no 
doubt," said Artemus, "that if I had whined or 
begged, I should have disgusted Halstead, and he 
would have put it to me tighter. As it was, he con- 
cluded that I was not a sneak, and treated me like 
a gentleman.' 
[114] 



jj 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Ai'temiis received many tempting offers from 
book publishers in London. Several of the Annuals 
for 1866-67 contain sketches, some of them anony- 
mous, written by liim, for all of which he was well 
paid. He wrote for Fun — the editor of which, 
Mr. Tom Hood, son of the great humorist, was 
an intimate friend — as well as for Punch; his con- 
tributions to the former being printed without his 
signature. If he had been permitted to remain 
until the close of his season, he would have earned 
enough, with what he had already, to attain the in- 
dependence which was his aim and hope. His best 
friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, 
Tom Robertson, the dramatist, Charles Mathews, 
the comedian, Tom Taylor and Arthur Sketchley. 
He did not meet Mr. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew 
Haliday, Dickens' familiar, was also his intimate. 
He was much persecuted by lion hunters, and 
therefore had to keep his lodgings something of a 
mystery. 

So little is known of Artemus Ward that some 
biographic particulars may not in this connection 
be out of place or lacking in interest. 

Charles F. Browne was born at Waterford, 
Maine, the 15th of July, 1833. His father was a 

[115] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

state senator, a probate judge, and at one time a 
wealthy citizen; but at his death, when his famous 
son was yet a lad, left his family little or no prop- 
erty. Charles apprenticed himself to a printer, and 
served out his time, first in Springfield and then in 
Boston. In the latter city he made the acquaintance 
of Shilaber, Ben Perley Poore, Halpme, and 
others, and tried his hand as a "sketchist" for a 
volume edited by Mrs. Partington. His early ef- 
fusions bore the signature of "Chub." From the 
Hub he emigrated to the West. At Toledo, Ohio, 
he worked as a "typo" and later as a "local" on a 
Toledo newspaper. Then he went to Cleveland, 
where as city editor of the Plain Dealer he began 
the peculiar vein from which still later he worked 
so successfully. 

The soubriquet "Artemus Ward," was not taken 
from the Revolutionary general. It was suggested 
by an actual personality. In an adjoining town to 
Cleveland there was a snake charmer who called 
himself Artemus Ward, an ignorant witling or 
half-wit, the laughing stock of the countryside. 
Browne's first communication over the signature of 
Artemus Ward purported to emanate from this 
person, and it succeeded so well that he kept it up. 
[116] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

He widened the conception as he progressed. It 
was not long before his sketches began to be copied 
and he became a newspaper favorite. He remained 
in Cleveland from 1857 to 18G0, when he was called 
to New York to take the editorship of a venture 
called Vanity Fair. This died soon after. But he 
did not die with it. A year later, in the fall of 
1861, he made his appearance as a lecturer at New 
London, and met with encouragement. Then he 
set out 671 tour, returned to the metropolis, hired a 
hall and opened with "the show." Thence onward 
all went well. 

The first money he made was applied to the pur- 
chase of the old family homestead in Maine, which 
he presented to his mother. The payments on this 
being completed, he bought himself a little nest on 
the Hudson, meaning, as he said, to settle down and 
perhaps to marry. But his dreams were not destined 
to be fulfilled. 

Thus, at the outset of a career from which much 
was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and 
original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the 
sphere in which at that time he was the most promi- 
nent figure. There was then no Mark Twain or 

[117] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Bret Harte. Plis rivals were such humorists as 
Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat Con- 
tributor, John Happy, Mrs. Partington, Bill Arp 
and the like, who are now mostly forgotten. 

Artemus Ward wrote little, but he made good 
and left his mark. Along with the queer John 
Phoenix his writings survived the deluge that fol- 
lowed them. He poured out the wine of life in a 
limpid stream. It may be fairly said that he did 
much to give permanency and respectability to the 
style of literature of which he was at once a brilliant 
illustrator and illustration. His was a short life 
indeed, though a merry one, and a sad death. In 
a strange land, yet surrounded by admiring friends, 
about to reach the coveted independence he had 
looked forward to so long, he sank to rest, his dust 
mingling with that of the great Thomas Hood, 
alongside of whom he was laid in Kensal Green. 



[118] 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

MAKK TWAIN THE ORIGINAL OF COLONEL MUL- 
BERRY SELLERS THE "eARL OF DURHAM^"— 

SOME NOCTES AMBROSIANAE — A JOKE ON 
MURAT HALSTEAD 



MARK TWAIN came down to the footlights 
long after Artemus Ward had passed from 
the scene ; but as an American humorist with whom 
during half a century I was closely intimate and 
round whom many of my London experiences re- 
volve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after 
his elder. There was not lacking a certain likeness 
between them. 

Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a 
domestic tie, though before either of us were born 
the two families on the maternal side had been 
neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an 
aunt of mine — the children of this marriage cousins 
in common to us — albeit, this apart, we were life- 

[119] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

time cronies. He always contended that we were 
"bloodkin." 

Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain ap- 
peared east of the Alleghanies and north of the 
Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the 
west, the bizarre alike of the pilot house and the 
mining camp very much in evidence, he came of 
decent people on both sides of the house. The 
Clemens and the Lamptons were of good old Eng- 
lish stock. Toward the middle of the eighteenth 
century three younger scions of the Manor of Dur- 
ham migrated from the County of Durham to 
Virginia and thence branched out into Tennessee, 
Kentucky and Missouri. 

His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with 
a taking drawl, a drawl that was high-bred and 
patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famous 
son inherited. All the women of that ilk were 
gentlewomen. The literary and artistic instinct 
which attained its fruition in him had percolated 
through the veins of a long line of silent singers, 
of poets and painters, unborn to the world of ex- 
pression till he arrived upon the scene. 

These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceed- 
ingly large, varied and picturesque assortment. 
[120] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of 
amusement to us. Just after the successful pro- 
duction of his play, The Gilded Age, and the up- 
roarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the lead- 
ing role, I received a letter from him in wliich he 
told me he had made in Colonel ISIulberry Sellers 
a close study of one of these kinsmen and thought 
he had drawn him to the hfe. "But for the love 
o' God," he said, ''don't whisper it, for he would 
never understand or forgive me, if he did not thrash 
me on sight." 

The pathos of the part, and not its comic aspects, 
had most impressed him. He designed and wrote 
it for Edwin Booth, From the first and always 
he was disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Ex- 
cept for its popularity and money-making, he 
would have withdrawn it from the stage as, in a 
fit of pique, Raymond himself did while it was still 
packing the theaters. 

The original Sellers had partly brought him up 
and had been very good to him. A second Don 
Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of 
La Mancha in character, it would have been safe 
for nobody to laugh at James Lampton, or by the 
slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat him 

[121] 



"MARSE HENRY'* 

with inconsideration, or any proposal of his, how- 
ever preposterous, with levity. 

He once came to visit me upon a public occasion 
and during a function. I knew that I must intro- 
duce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my 
colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, 
wearing a black, swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, 
and a silk hat, bound with black crepe to conceal its 
rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his 
linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my 
fears. Happily the company, quite dazed by the 
apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the 
kind old gentleman, pleased with himself and 
proud of his "distinguished young kinsman," went 
away highly gratified. 

Not long after this one of his daughters — pretty 
girls they were, too, and in charm altogether 
worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens — was to be 
married, and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, 
all-embracing, though stiff and formal, such as a 
baron of the Middle Ages might have indited to his 
noble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring 
his good lady and his retinue and abide within the 
castle until the festivities were ended, though in 
this instance the castle was a suburban cottage 
[122] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal 
couple. I showed the bombastic but hospitable and 
genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who 
chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached 
me. He read it through with care and reread it. 

"Do you know," said he, "it makes me want to 
cry. That is not the man I am trying to imper- 
sonate at all." 

Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny 
about tlfe spiritual being of Mark Twain's Colonel 
Mulberry Sellers ; he was as brave as a lion and as 
upright as Sam Clemens himself. 

When a very young man, hving in a woodland 
cabin down in the PennjTile region of Kentucky, 
with a wife he adored and two or three small chil- 
dren, he was so carried away by an unexpected 
windfall that he lingered overlong in the nearby 
village, dispensing a royal hospitality; in point of 
fact, he "got on a spree." Two or three days passed 
before he regained possession of himself. When at 
last he reached home, he found his wife ill in bed 
and the children nearl}^ starved for lack of food. 
He said never a word, but walked out of the cabin, 
tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping 
himself when the cries of the frightened family sum- 

[123] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

moned the neighbors and he was brought to reason. 

He never touched an intoxicating drop from that 

day to his death. 

II 

Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was 
the "Earl of Durham." I ought to say that Mark 
Twain and I grew up on old wives' tales of estates 
and titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of 
humor in both of us, we treated with shocking 
irreverence. It happened some fifty years ago that 
there turned up, first upon the plains and afterward 
in New York and Washington, a lineal descendant 
of the oldest of the Virginia Lamptons — lie had 
somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a bundle 
of documents — who was what a certain famous 
American would have called a "corker." He wore 
a sombrero with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt 
with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself 
and claimed to be the Earl of Durham. 

"He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever 
saw him," drawled Mark to me, "and I coughed it 
up and have been coughing them up, whenever he's 
around, with punctuality and regularity." 

The "Earl" was indeed a terror, especially when 
he had been drinking. His belief in his peerage 
[124] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

was as absolute as Colonel Sellers' in his millions. 
All he wanted was money enough "to get over 
there" and "state his case." During the Tichborne 
trial IMark Twain and I were in London, and one 
day he said to me: 

"I have investigated this Durham business down 
at the Herald's office. There's nothing to it. The 
Lamptons passed out of the Demesne of Durham a 
hundred years ago. They had long before dissi- 
pated the estates. Whatever the title, it lapsed. 
The present earldom is a new creation, not the 
same family at all. But, I tell you what, if you'll 
put up five hundred dollars I'll put up five hundred 
more, we'll fetch our chap across and set him in as 
a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy 
won't be a marker to him !" 

He was so pleased with his conceit that later 
along he wrote a novel and called it The Claimant. 
It is the only one of his books, though I never told 
him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, 
I happened to see upon a hotel register in Rome 
these entries: "The Earl of Durham," and in the 
same handwriting just below it, "Lady Anne 
Lambton" and "The Hon. Reginald Lambton." 
So the Lambtons — they spelled it with a b instead 

[125] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

of a p — ^were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was 
Earl of Durham. The next time I saw Mark I 
rated him on his deception. He did not defend 
himself, said something about its being necessary 
to perfect the joke. 

"Did you ever meet tliis present peer and possible 
usurper?" I asked. 

"No," he answered, *'I never did, but if he had 
called on me, I would have had him come up." 

Ill 

His mind turned ever to the droll. Once in Lon- 
don I was living with my family at 103 Mount 
Street. Between 103 and 102 there was the 
parochial workhouse, quite a long and imposing 
edifice. One evening, upon coming in from an out- 
ing, I found a letter he had written on the sitting- 
room table. He had left it with his card. He spoke 
of the shock he had received upon finding that next 
to 102 — presumably 103 — was the workhouse. He 
had loved me, but had always feared that I would 
end by disgracing the family — being hanged or 
something — but the "work'us," that was beyond 
him; he had not thought it would come to that. And 
so on through pages of horseplay; his relief on 
[126] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ascertaining the truth and learning his mistake, his 
regret at not finding me at home, closing with a 
dinner invitation. 

It was at Geneva, Switzerland, that I received a 
long, overflowing letter, full of flamboyant oddi- 
ties, wi'itten from London. Two or three hours 
later came a telegram. "Burn letter. Blot it from 
your memory. Susie is dead." 

How much of melancholy laj^ hidden behind the 
mask of his humour it would be hard to say. His 
griefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism. He 
was a medley of contradictions. Unconventional 
to the point of eccentricity, his sense of his proper 
dignity was sound and sufficient. Though lavish 
in the use of money, he had a full reahzation of its 
value and made close contracts for his work. Like 
Sellers, his mind soared when it sailed financial cur- 
rents. He lacked acute business judgment in the 
larger things, while an excellent economist in the 
lesser. 

His marriage was the most brilliant stroke of his 
life. He got the woman of all the world he most 
needed, a truly lovely and wise helpmate, who kept 
him in bounds and headed him straight and right 
while she lived. She was the best of housewives 

[127] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and mothers, andi the safest of counsellors and 
critics. She knew his worth; she appreciated his 
genius; she understood his hmitations and angles. 
Her death was a grievous disaster as well as a 
staggering blow. He never wholly recovered from 

it. 

IV 

It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain 
dropped into New York, where there was already 
gathered a congenial group to meet and greet him. 
John Hay, quoting old Jack Dade's description of 
himself, was wont to speak of this group as "of 
high aspirations and peregrinations." It radiated 
between Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Har- 
per — "Joe Brooklyn," we called him — reigned in 
place of his uncle, Fletcher Harper, the man of 
genius among the original Harper Brothers, and 
the Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmoni- 
co's, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth 
Street, with Sutherland's in Liberty Street for a 
downtown place of luncheon resort, not to forget 
Dorlon's in Fulton Market. 

The Harper contingent, beside its chief, em- 
braced Tom Nast and William A. Seaver, whom 
John Russell Young named "Papa Pendennis," 
|[128] 



^*~ 



fy 



l,'^^**-- ^ 



%'i 



■?if 



f 



^^^k 



n 



^wSK- 



GEXEHAL LEOXIDAS POLK — LIEUTEXANT C.EXEUAL 

C. S. A. KILLED IX GEORGIA JTXE 14, 1864 

P. E. BTSTTOP OF I.OIISIAXA 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and pictured as "a man of letters among men of 
the world and a man of the world among men of 
letters," a very apt phrase appropriated from Doc- 
tor Johnson, and Major Constable, a giant, who 
looked like a dragoon and not a bookman, yet had 
known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the 
family of Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had 
but newly arrived from Cahfornia. Whitelaw 
Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was be- 
ginning to make himself felt in journalism. John 
Hay played high priest to the revels. Occasionally 
I made a pious pilgrimage to the delightful shrine. 
Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than 
the graces, though all of us had literary leanings of 
one sort and another, especially late at night; and 
Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield 
and Murat Halstead from Cincinnati to join us. 
Howells, always something of a prig, living in Bos- 
ton, held himself at too high account ; but often we 
had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his 
career, with once in a while Edwin Booth, who 
could not quite trust himself to go our gait. The 
fine fellows we caught from oversea were innumer- 
able, from the elder Sothern and Sala and Yates 
to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton. Times 

[129] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

went very well those days, and whilst some looked 
on askance, notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Sted- 
man, and thought we were wasting time and con- 
viviahzing more than was good for us, we were 
mostly young and hearty, ranging from thirty to 
five and forty years of age, with amazing capabili- 
ties both for work and play, and I cannot recall 
that any hurt to any of us came of it. 

Although robustious, our fribbles were harm- 
less enough — ebullitions of animal spirit, some- 
times perhaps of gaiety unguarded — though each 
shade, treading the Celestian way, as most of them 
do, and recurring to those Noctes Ambrosianse, 

might e'en repeat to the other the words on a mem- 
orable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord 
Avonmore : 

''We spent them not in toys or lust or wine; 

But search of deep philosophy. 

Wit, eloquence and poesy — 

^Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine." 



Mark Twain was the life of every company and 
all occasions. I remember a practical joke of his 
[130] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party 
of us were supping after the theater at the old 
Brevoort House. A card was brought to me from 
a reporter of the World. I was about to deny 
myself, when JMark Twain said: 

''Give it to me, I'll fix it," and left the table. 

Presently he came to the door and beckoned me 
out. 

"I represented myself as your secretary and told 
this man," said he, "that you were not here, but 
that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as well I 
would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb 
and doesn't know either of you. I am going to 
introduce you as Halstead and we'll have some 
fun." 

No sooner said than done. The reporter proved 
to be a little bald-headed cherub newly arrived from 
the isle of dreams, and I lined out to him a column 
or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in 
every opinion. I declared him in favor of paying 
the national debt in greenbacks. Touching the sec- 
tional question, which was then the burning issue 
of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: "The 
'bloody shirt' is onty a kind of Pickwickian battle 
cry. It is convenient during pohtical campaigns 

[131] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and on election day. Perhaps you do not know 
that I am myself of dyed-in-the-wool Southern and 
secession stock. My father and grandfather came 
to Ohio from South Carolina just before I was 
born. Naturally I have no sectional prejudices, 
but I live in Cincinnati and I am a Republican." 

There was not a little more of the same sort. 
Just how it passed through the World office I 
know not ; but it actually appeared. On returning 
to the table I told the company what Mark Twain 
and I had done. They thought I was joking. 
Without a word to any of us, next day Halstead 
wrote a note to the World repudiating the inter- 
view, and the World printed his disclaimer with 
a line which said: "When Mr. Halstead conversed 
with our reporter he had dined." It was too good 
to keep. A day or two later, John Hay wrote an 
amusing story for the Tribune, wliich set Halstead 
right. 

Mark Twain's place in literature is not for me 
to fix. Some one has called him "The Lincoln of 
letters." That is striking, suggestive and apposite. 
The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln 
possessed a kinship outside the circumstances of 
their early lives ; the common lack of tools to work 
[132] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

with; the privations and hardships to be endured 
and to overcome; the way ahead through an un- 
blazed and trackless forest; every footstep over a 
stumbHng block and each effort saddled with a 
handicap. But they got there, both of them, they 
got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the stars 
the light of their eyes is shining down upon us 
even as, amid the thunders of a world tempest, we 
are not wholly forgetful of them. 



[183] 



CHAPTER THE SIXTH 

HOUSTON AND WIGFAIX OF TEXAS — STEPHEN A. 

DOUGLAS THE TWADDLE ABOUT PURITANS AND 

CAVALIERS ANDREW JOHNSON AND JOHN C 

BRECKENRIDGE 



THE National Capitol — old men's fancies 
fondly turn to thoughts of youth — was 
picturesque in its personalities if not in its architec- 
ture. By no means the least striking of these was 
General and Senator Sam Houston, of Texas. In 
his life of adventure truth proved very much 
stranger than fiction. 

The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could 
pass no way without attracting attention ; strangers 
in the Senate gallery first asked to have him pointed 
out to them, and seeing him to all appearance 

idling his time with his jacknife and bits of soft 
wood which he whittled into various shapes of 
hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady 
[134] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

acquaintances, they usually went away thinking 
him a queer old man. So inded he was; yet on his 
feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when 
he chose, altogether the statesman and orator. 

There united in him the spirits of the troubadour 
and the spearman. Ivanhoe was not more gallant 
nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the 
prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surg- 
ing subterranean flood that stirred and lifted him 
to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales 
to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy 
summer afternoon on the shady side of Willard's 
Hotel — the Senate not in session — he might be 
seen, an admiring grouj) about him, spinning these 
yarns, mostly of personal experience — rarely if 
ever repeating himself — and in tone, gesture and 
grimace reproducing the drolleries of the back- 
woods, which from boyhood had been his home. 

He spared not himself. ' According to his own 
account he had been in the early days of his Texas 
career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once 
heard him say, referring to the beginning of the 
Texas revolution, as he gave a side-spHtting picture 
of that bloody episode, "and I reahzed that some- 
body must get sober and keep sober." 

[135] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

From the hour of that realization, when he 
"swore off," to the hour of his death he never 
touched intoxicants of any sort. 

He had fought under Jackson, had served two 
terms in Congress and had been elected governor 
of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in 
love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well- 
bom and highly educated, a schoolmate of my 
mother's elder sister. She was persuaded by her 
family to throw over an obscure young man whom 
she preferred, and to marry a young man so eligible 
and distinguished. 

He took her to Nashville, the state capital. 
There were rounds of gayety. Three months 
passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the 
startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the 
brilliant young couple had come to a parting of 
the ways. The wife had returned to her people. 
The husband had resigned his office and was gone, 
no one knew where. 

A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a 
divorce, which in those days had to be granted by 
the state legislature. Inevitably reports derogatory 
to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings 
of Governor Houston's whereabouts were con- 
[136] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

tained in a letter he wrote from somewhere in the 
Indian country to my father, a member of the legis- 
lature to whom Mrs. Houston had applied, in which 
he said that these reports had come to his ears. 
"They are," he wrote, "as false as hell. If they be 
not stopped I will return to Tennessee and have 
the heart's blood of him who repeats them. A 
nobler, purer woman never lived. She should be 
promptly given the divorce she asks. I alone am 
to blame." 

She married again, though not the lover she had 
discarded. I knew her in her old age — a gentle, 
placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I could 
read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this 
chapter, likewise married again a wise and 
womanly woman who bore him many children and 
with whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, 
however, he had dwelt with the Indians and had 
become an Indian chief. "Big Drunk, they called 
me," he said to his familiars. His enemies averred 
that he brought into the world a whole tribe of half- 
breeds. 

n 

Houston was a rare performer before a popular 
audience. His speech abounded with argumenta- 

[137] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

tive appeal and bristled with illustrative anecdote, 
and, when occasion required, with apt repartee. 

Once an Irishman in the crowd bawled out, "ye 
were goin' to sell Texas to England." 

Houston paused long enough to center attention 
upon the quibble and then said: "My friend, I first 
tried, unsuccessfully, to have the United States take 
Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn 
Texas over to England did I finally succeed. There 
may be within the sound of my voice some who 
have knowledge of sheep culture. They have doubt- 
less seen a motherless lamb put to the breast of a 
cross old ewe who refused it suck. Then the wise 
shepherd calls his dog and there is no further 
trouble. My friend, England was my dog." 

He was inveighing against the New York 
Tribune. Having described Horace Greeley as 
the sum of all villainy — "whose hair is white, whose 
skin is white, whose eyes are white, whose clothes 
are white, and whose liver is in mj^- opinion of the 
same color" — he continued: "The assistant editor 
of the Try-bune is Robinson — Solon Robinson. 
He is an Irishman, an Orange Irishman, a red- 
haired Irishman!" Casting his eye over the audi- 
ence and seeing quite a sprinkling of redheads, and 
[138] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

realizing that he had prepetrated a sHp of tongue, 
he added: "Fellow citizens, when I say that Rob- 
inson is a red-haired Irishman I mean no disrespect 
to persons whose hair is of that color. I have been 
a close observer of men and women for thirty 
years, and I never knew a red-haired man who was 
not an honest man, nor a red-headed woman who 
was not a virtuous woman ; and I give it you as my 
candid opinion that had it not been for Robinson's 
red hair he would have been hanged long ago." 

His pathos was not far behind his humor — 
though he used it sparingly. At a certain town in 
Texas there lived a desperado who had threatened 
to kill him on sight. The town was not on the 
route of his sjieaking dates but he went out of his 
way to include it. A great concourse assembled 
to hear him. He spoke in the open air and, as he 
began, observed his man leaning against a tree 
armed to the teeth and waiting for him to finish. 
After a few opening remarks, he dropped into the 
reminiscential. He talked of the old times in 
Texas. He told in thrilhng terms of the Alamo 
and of Goliad. There was not a dry eye in earshot. 
Then he grew personal. 

"I see Tom Gilligan over yonder. A braver man 

[139] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

never lived than Tom Gilligan. He fought by my 
side at San Jacinto. Together we buried poor Bill 
Holman. But for his skill and courage I should 
not be here to-day. He " 

There was a stir in front. Gilligan had thrown 
away his knife and gun and was rushing unarmed 
through the crowd, tears streaming down his face. 

"For God's sake, Houston," he cried, "don't say 
another word and forgive me my cowardly inten- 
tion." 

From that time to his death Tom GilUgan was 
Houston's devoted friend. 

General Hoiiston vofted against the Kansasi- 
Nebraska Bill, and as a consequence lost his seat 
in the Senate. It was thought, and freely said, 
that for good and all he was down and out. He 
went home and announced himself a candidate for 
governor of Texas. 

The campaign that followed was of unexampled 
bitterness. The secession wave was already mount- 
ing high. Houston was an uncompromising Union- 
ist. His defeat was generally expected. But there 
was no beating such a man in a fair and square con- 
test before the people. When the votes were 
counted he led his competitor by a big majority. 
[140] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

As governor he refused two years later to sign the 

ordinance of secession and was deposed from office 

by force. He died before the end of the war which 

so signally vindicated his wisdom and verified his 

forecast. 

Ill 

Stephen Arnold Douglas was the Charles James 
Fox of American politics. He was not a gambler 
as Fox was. But he went the other gaits and was 
possessed of a sweetness of disposition which made 
him, hke Fox, loved where he was personally 
known. No one could resist the bonhomie of 
Douglas. 

They are not all Puritans in New England. 
Catch a Yankee off his base, quite away from home, 
and he can be as gay as anybody. Boston and 
Charleston were in high party times nearest alike 
of any two American cities. 

Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was 
born in Vermont. As Seargent Prentiss had done 
he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came 
of age, settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled 
in Mississippi, to grow into a typical Westerner as 
Prentiss into a typical Southerner. 

There was never a more absurd theory than that, 

[141] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

begot of sectional aims and the sectional spirit, 
which proposed a geographic alignment of Cavalier 
and Puritan. When sectionalism had brought a 
kindred people to blows over the institution of 
African slavery there were Puritans who fought on 
the Southern side and Cavaliers who fought on the 
Northern side. What was Stonewall Jackson but 
a Puritan? What were Custer, Stoneman and 
Kearny but Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as abso- 
lute an aristocrat as Hampton. 

In the old days before the war of sections the 
South was full of typical Southerners of Northern 
birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New 
York, and Robert J. Walker, who went from Penn- 
sylvania to Mississippi; James H. Hammond, 
whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts 
to South Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in 
New York, was thirty years old when he went to 
Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose and 
exj^ectancy of the young Confederacy — the most 
tj^pical of rebel soldiers — had not a drop of South- 
ern blood in his veins, born in Kentucky a few 
months after his father and mother had arrived 
there from Connecticut. The list might be ex- 
tended indefinitely. 
[142] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Climate, which has something to do with tem- 
perament, has not so much to do with character as 
is often imagined. All of us are more or less the 
creatures of environment. In the South after a 
fashion the duello flourished. Because it had not 
flourished in the North there rose a notion that 
the Northerners would not fight. It proved to 
those who thought it a costly mistake. 

Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue 
of issues — the issue behind all issues — was the pres- 
ervation of the Union. Between 1820 and 1850, by 
a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. 
Clay, its threatened disruption had been averted. 
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a sore strain upon 
conservative elements North and South. The 
Whig Party went to pieces. ]Mr. Clay passed from 
the scene. Had he lived until the presidential elec- 
tion of 1852 he would have given his support to 
Franklin Pierce, as Daniel Webster did. Mr. 
Buchanan was !not a General Jackson. Judge 
Douglas, who sought to play the role of Mr. Clay, 
was too late. The secession leaders held the whip 
hand in the Gulf States. South Carolina was to 
have her will at last. Crash came the shot in 
Charleston Harbor and the fall of Sumter. Curi- 

[143] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ously enough two persons of Kentucky birth — 
Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis — led the 
rival hosts of war into which an untenable and in- 
defensible system of slave labor, for which the two 
sections were equally responsible, had precipitated 
an unwilling people. 

Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been 
Mr. Lincoln's main reliance in Congress. As a 
debater his resources and prowess were rarely 
equaled and never surpassed. His personality, 
whether in debate or private conversation, was at- 
tractive in the highest degree. He possessed a full, 
melodious voice, convincing fervor and ready wit. 

He had married for his second wife the reigning 
belle of the National Capital, a great-niece of Mrs. 
JVIadison, whose very natural ambitions quickened 
and spurred his own. 

It was fated otherwise. Like Clay, Webster, 
Calhoun and Blaine he was to be denied the 
Presidency. The White House was barred to him. 
He was not yet fifty when he died. 

Tidings of his death took the country by sur- 
prise. But already the sectional battle was on 
and it produced only a momentary impression, to 
be soon forgotten amid the overwhelming tumult of 
[144] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

events. He has lain in his grave now nearly sixty 
years. Upon the legislation of his time his name 
was writ first in water and then in blood. He re- 
ceived less than his desert in life and the historic 
record has scarcely done justice to his merit. He 
was as great a party leader as Clay. He could hold 
his own in debate with Webster and Calhoun. He 
died a very poor man, though his opportunity for 
enrichment by perfectly legitimate means were 
many. It is enough to say that he lacked the busi- 
ness instinct and set no value upon money; 
scrupulously upright in his official dealing ; holding 
his senatorial duties above all price and beyond the 
suspicion of dirt. 

Touching a matter which involved a certain out- 
lay in the winter of 1861, he laughingly said to me; 
"I haven't the wherewithal to pay for a bottle of 
whisky and shall have to borrow of Arnold Harris 
the wherewithal to take me home." 

His wife was a glorious creature. Early one 
morning calling at their home to see Judge Douglas 
I was ushered into the library, where she was en- 
gaged setting things to rights. My entrance took 
her by surprise. I had often seen her in full ball- 
room regaha and in becoming out-of-door costume, 

[145] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

but as, in gingham gown and white apron, she 
turned, a little startled by my sudden appearance, 
smiles and blushes in spite of herself, I thought I 
had never seen any woman so beautiful before. 
She married again — the lover whom gossip said she 
had thrown over to marry Judge Douglas — and the 
story went that her second marriage was not very 
happy. 

IV 

In the midsummer of 1859 the burning question 
among the newsmen of Washington was the Cen- 
tral American Mission. England and France had 
displayed activity in that quarter and it was 
deemed important that the United States should 
sit up and take notice. An Isthmian canal was be- 
ing considered. 

Speculation was rife whom Mr. Buchanan would 
send to represent us. The press gang of the Na- 
tional Capital was all at sea. There was scarcely 
a Democratic leader of national prominence whose 
name was not mentioned in that connection, though 
speculation from day to day eddied round Mr. 
James S. Rollins, of Missouri, an especial friend 
of the President and a most accomplished public 
man. 

[146] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

At the height of excitement I happened to be in 
the hbrary of the State Department. I was on a 
step-ladder in quest of a book when I heard a mes- 
senger say to the hbrarian: "The President is in 
the Secretary's room and wants to have Mr. 
Dimitry come there right away." An inspiration 
shot through me hke a flash. They had chosen 
Alexander Dimitry for the Central American Mis- 
sion. 

He was the official translator of the Department 
of State. Though an able and learned man he was 
not in the line of preferment. He was without 
political standing or backing of any sort. At first 
blush a more unlikely, impossible appointment 
could hardly be suggested. But — so on the instant 
I reasoned — he was peculiarly fitted in his own per- 
son for the post in question. Though of Greek 
origin he looked like a Spaniard. He spoke the 
Spanish language fluently. He had the procedure 
of the State Department at his finger's ends. He 
was the head of a charming domestic fabric — his 
daughters the prettiest girls in Washington. Whj^ 
not? 

I climbed down from my stepladder and made 
tracks for the office of the afternoon newspaper 

[147] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

for which I was doing all-round work. I was 
barely on time, the last forms being locked when I 
got there. I had the editorial page opened and in- 
serted at the top of the leading column a double- 
leaded paragraph announcing that the agony was 
over — that the Gordian knot was cut — that Alex- 
ander Dimitry had been selected as Envoy Extraor- 
dinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Central 
American States. 

It proved a veritable sensation as well as a 
notable scoop. To increase my glory the corres- 
pondents of the New York dailies scouted it. But 
in a day or two it was officially confirmed. General 
Cass, the Secretary of State, sent for me, having 
learned that I had been in the department about 
the time of the consultation between the President, 
himself and Mr. Dimitry. 

"How did you get this?" he asked rather sharply. 

"Out of my inner consciousness," I answered with 
flippant familiarity. "Didn't you know that I have 
what they call second sight ?" 

The old gentleman laughed amiably. "It would 
seem so," he said, and sent me about my business 
without further inquiry. 

[148] 



"MARSE HENRY" 



In the National Capital the winter of 1860-61 
was both stormy and nebulous. Parties were at 
sea. The Northerners in Congress had learned the 
trick of bullying from the Southerners. In the 
Senate, Chandler was a match for Toombs; and in 
the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and La- 
mar. All of them, more or less, were playing a 
game. If sectional war, which was incessantly 
threatened by the two extremes, had been keenly 
realized and seriously considered it might have been 
averted. Very few believed that it would come to 
actual war. 

A convention of Border State men, over which 
ex-Prjesident John Tyler presided, was held in 
Washington. It might as well have been held at 
the North Pole. Moderate men were brushed 
aside, their counsels whistled down the wind. There 
was a group of Senators, headed by Wigfall of 
Texas, who meant disunion and war, and another 
group, headed by Seward, Hale and Chase, who 
had been goaded up to this. Reading contemporary 
history and, seeing the high-mightiness with which 
the Germans began what we conceive their raid 

[149] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

upon humanity, we are wont to regard it as evi- 
dence of incredible stupidity, whereas it was, in 
point of fact, rather a miscalculation of forces. 
That was the error of the secession leaders. They 
refused to count the cost. Yancey firmly believed 
that England would be forced to intervene. The 
mills of Lancashire he thought could not get on 
without Southern cotton. He was sent abroad. 
He found Europe solid against slavery and there- 
fore set against the Confederacy. He came home 
with what is called a broken heart — the dreams of 
a lifetime shattered — and, in a kind of dazed stupor, 
laid himself down to die. With Richmond in 
flames and the exultant shouts of the detested yet 
victorious Yankees in his ears, he did die. 

Wigfall survived but a few j'-ears. He was less 
a dreamer than Yancey. A man big of brain and 
warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad pro- 
vincialism of South Carolina to the windswept 
vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly the Yancey 
confession of faith; that secession was a constitu- 
tional right; that African slavery was ordained of 
God; that the South was paramount, the North in- 
ferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had learned 
more than Yancey — was an abler man than Jeffer- 
[150] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

son Davis — and but for his affections and generous 
habits he would have made a larger figure in the 
war, having led the South's exit from the Senate. 

VI 

I do not think that either Hammond or Chest- 
nut, the Senators from South Carolina, both men 
of parts, had at bottom much belief in the practica- 
bility of the Confederate movement. Neither had 
the Senators from Arkansas and Alabama, nor 
Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of Jefferson 
Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, 
and Iverson, of Georgia, another, were the kind of 
men whom Wigfall dominated. 

One of the least confident of those who looked on 
and afterward fell in line was the Vice President, 
John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was the 
Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney 
Johnston, among soldiers. Never man handsomer 
in person or more winning in manners. Sprung 
from a race of political aristocrats, he was born to 
early and shining success in public life. Of mode- 
rate opinions, winning and prudent, wherever he 
appeared he carried his audience with him. He had 
been elected on the ticket with Buchanan to the 

[151] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

second office under the Government, when he was 
but five and thirty years of age. There was noth- 
ing for him to gain from a division of the Union; 
the Presidency, perhaps, if the Union continued un- 
divided. But he could not resist the onrush of dis- 
unionism, went with the South, which he served 
first in the field and later as Confederate Secretary 
of War, and after a few years of self-imposed exile 
in Europe returned to Kentucky to die at four and 
fifty, a defeated and disappointed old man. 

The adjoining state of Tennessee was repre- 
sented in the Senate by one of the most problematic 
characters in American history. With my father, 
who remained his friend through life, he had entered 
the state legislature in 1835, and having served ten 
years in the lower House of Congress, and four 
years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 
1857 to the National Capital, a member of the 
Upper House. He was Andrew Johnson. 

I knew him from my childhood. Thrice that I 
can recall I saw him weep; never did I see him 
laugh. Life had been very serious, albeit very suc- 
cessful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife 
he had married before he was one and twenty had 

taught him to read. Yet at six and twenty he was 
[152] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

in the Tennessee General Assembly and at four 
and thirty in Congress. 

There was from first to last not a little about him 
to baffle conjecture. I should call him a cross be- 
tween Jack Cade and Aaron Burr. His sympathies 
were easily stirred by rags in distress. But he was 
uncompromising in his detestation of the rich. It 
was said that he hated "a biled shirt." He would 
have nothing to do "with people who wore broad- 
cloth," though he carefully dressed himself. When, 
as governor of Tennessee, he came to Nashville he 
refused many invitations to take his first New 
Year's dinner with a party of toughs at the house 
of a river roustabout. 

There was nothing of the tough about him, how- 
ever. His language was careful and exact. I 
never heard him utter an oath or tell a risque story. 
He passed quite fifteen years in Washington, a 
total abstainer from the use of intoxicants. He 
fell into the occasional-drink habit during the dark 
days of the AYar. But after some costly experience 
he dropped it and continued a total abstainer to 
the end of his days. 

He had, indeed, admirable self-control. I do 
not believe a more conscientious man ever hved. 

[153] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

His judgments were sometimes peculiar, but they 
were upright and sincere, having reasons, which he 
could give with power and effect, behind them. Yet 
was he a born politician, crafty to a degree, and al- 
ways successful, relying upon a popular following 
which never failed him. 

In 1860 he supported the quasi-secession Breck- 
enridge and Lane Presidential ticket, but in 1861 
he stood true to the Union, retaining his seat in the 
Senate until he was appointed military governor of 
Tennessee. Nominated for Vice President on the 
ticket with Lincoln, in 1864, he was elected, and 
upon the assassination of Lincoln succeeded to the 
Presidency. Having served out his term as Presi- 
dent he returned to Tennessee to engage in the hot- 
test kind of politics, and though at the outset de- 
feated finally regained his seat in the Senate of the 
United States. 

He hated Grant with a holy hate. His first act 
on reentering the Senate was to deliver an im- 
placably bitter speech against the President. It 
was his last public appearance. He went thence 
to his home in East Tennessee, gratified and happy, 
to die in a few weeks. 

[154] 



"MARSE HENRY" 



VII 



There used to be a story about Raleigh, in North 
Carohna, where Andrew Johnson was born, which 
whispered that he was a natural son of William 
Ruffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the 
nineteenth century. It was analogous to the story 
that Lincoln was the natural son of various j)aterni- 
ties from time to time assigned to him. I had my 
share in running that calumny to cover. It was a 
lie out of whole cloth with nothing whatever to sup- 
port or excuse it. I reached the bottom of it to dis- 
cover proof of its baselessness abundant and con- 
clusive. In Johnson's case I take it that the story 
had nothing other to rest on than the obscurity of 
his birth and the quality of his talents. Late in hfe 
Johnson went to Raleigh and caused to be erected 
a modest tablet over the spot pointed out as the 
grave of his progenitor, saying, I was told by per- 
sons claiming to have been present, "I place this 
stone over the last earthly abode of my alleged 
father." 

Johnson, in the saying of the countryside, "out- 
married himself." His wife was a plain woman, 
but came of good family. One day, when a child, so 

[155] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the legend ran, she saw passing through the Green- 
ville street in which her people lived, a woman, a boy 
and a cow, the boy carrying a pack over his shoul- 
der. They were obviously weary and hungry. Ex- 
treme poverty could present no sadder picture. 
"Mother," cried the girl, "there goes the man I am 
going to marry." She was thought to be in jest. 
But a few years later she made her banter good 
and lived to 'see heii husband Pjresident of the- 
United States and with him to occupy the White 
House at Washington. 

Much has been written of the humble birth and 
iron fortune of Abraham Lincoln. He had no such 
obstacles to overcome as either Andrew Jackson or 
Andrew Johnson. Jackson, a prisoner of war, was 
liberated, a lad of sixteen, from the British pen at 
Charleston, without a relative, a friend or a dollar 
in the world, having to make his way upward 
through the most aristocratic community of the 
country and the time. Johnson, equally friendless 
and penniless, started as a poor tailor in a rustic 
village. Lincoln must therefore, take third place 
among our self-made Presidents. The Hanks 
family were not paupers. He had a wise and help- 
ful stepmother. He was scarcely worse off than 
[156] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

most young fellows of his neighborhood, first in 
Indiana and then in Illinois. On this side justice 
has never been rendered to Jackson and Jolinson. 
In the case of Jackson the circumstance was for- 
gotten, while Johnson too often dwelt upon it and 
made capital out of it. 

Under date of the 23rd of May, 1919, the Hon. 
Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, writes 
me the following letter, which I violate no confi- 
dence in reproducing in this connection: 

My Dear Marse Henry: — 

I can't tell you how much delight and pleasure 
your reminiscences in the Saturday Evening Post 
have given me, as well as the many others who have 
followed them, and I suppose you will put them in 
a volume when they are finished, so that we may 
have the pleasure of reading them in connected 
order. 

As you know, I live in Raleigh and I was very 
much interested in your article in the issue of April 
5, 1919, with reference to Andrew Johnson, in 
which you quote a story that "used to be current 
in Raleigh, that he was the son of William Ruffin, 
an eminent jurist of the ninetenth century." I 

[157] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

had never heard this story, but the story that was 
gossiped there was that he was the son of a certain 
Senator Haywood. I ran that story down and 
found that it had no foundation whatever, because 
if he had been the son of the Senator reputed to be 
his father, the Senator was of the age of twelve 
years when Andrew Johnson was born. 

My own information is, for I have made some 
investigation of it, that the story about Andrew 
Johnson's having a father other than the husband 
of his mother, is as wanting in foundation as the 
story about Abraham Lincoln. You did a great 
service in running that down and exposing it, and 
I trust before you finish your book that you will 
make further investigation and be able to do a like 
service in repudiating the unjust, idle gossip with 
reference to Andrew Johnson. In your article you 
say that persons who claim to have been present 
when Johnson came to Raleigh and erected a monu- 
ment over the grave of his father, declare that 
Johnson said he placed this stone over the last 
earthly abode of "my alleged father." That is one 
phase of the gossip, and the other is that he said 
"my reputed father," both equally false. 

The late Mr. Pulaski Cowper, who was private 
[158] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

secretary to Governor Bragg, of our State, just 
prior to the war, and who was afterwards president 
of our leading life insurance company, a gentleman 
of high character, and of the best memory, was 
present at the time that Johnson made the address 
from which you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper 
wrote an article for The News and Observer, giv- 
ing the story and relating that Johnson said that 
"he was glad to come to Raleigh to erect a tablet 
to his father." The truth is that while his father 
was a man of little or no education, he held the 
position of janitor at the State Capitol, and he 
was not wanting in qualities which made him 
superior to his humble position. If he had been 
living in this day he would have been given a life- 
saving medal, for upon the occasion of a picnic 
near Raleigh when the cry came that children were 
drowning he was the first to leap in and endanger 
his life to save them. 

Andrew Johnson's mother was related to the 
Chappell family, of which there are a number of 
citizens of standing and character near Raleigh, 
several of them having been ministers of the 
Gospel, and one at least having gained distinction 
as a missionary in China. 

[159] 



' MARSE HENRY" 

I am writing you because I know that your story 
will be read and accepted and I thought you would 
be glad to have this story, based upon a study and 
investigation and personal knowledge of Mr. 
Cowper, whose character and competency are well 
known in North Carolina. 



[160] 



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 

AN OLD NEWSPAPER ROOKERY — REACTIONARY SEC- 
TIONALISM IN CINCINNATI AND LOUISVILLE — 
THE COURIER-JOURNAL 



MY di^eam of wealth through my commission 
on the Confederate cotton I was to sell to 
English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton 
was burned and I found myself in the early spring 
of 1865 in the little village of Glendale, a suburb of 
Cincinnati, where the future Justice Stanley Mat- 
thews had his home. His wife was a younger sister 
of my mother. ]My grandmother was still alive and 
lived with her daughter and son-in-law. 

I was received with open arms. A few days later 
the dear old lady said to me: "I suppose, my son, 
you are rather a picked bird after your adventures 
in the South. You certainly need better clothing. 
I have some money in bank and it is freely yours." 

I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up 

[161] 



"MAUSE HENRY'^ 

to this, and out of sheer curiosity I asked her how 
much she could let me have. She named what 
seemed to me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, 
told her I had quite a sufficiency for the time being, 
slipped into town and pawned my watch; that is, 
as I made light of it afterward in order to escape 
the humiliation of borrowing from an uncle whose 
politics I did not approve, I went with my collateral 
to an uncle who had no politics at all and got fifty 
dollars on it! Before the money was gone I had 
found, through Judge Matthews, congenial work. 

There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon news- 
paper — the Evening Times — owned by Calvin W. 
Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but was 
grown very rich. He received me kindly, said the 
editorial force was quite full — must always be, on 
a daily newspaper — "but," he added, "my brother, 
Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the 
amusements, wants to go a-fishing in Canada — to 
be gone a month — and, if you wish, you can during 
his absence sub for him." 

It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alex- 
ander Starbuck returned the leading editor of the 
paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio 
River and was drowned. The next day General 
[162] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Starbuck sent for me and offered me the vacant 
place. 

"Why, general," I said, "I am an outlawed man: 
I do not agree with your politics. I do not see how 
I can undertake a place so conspicuous and re- 
sponsible." 

He replied: "I propose to engage you as an 
editorial manager. It is as if building a house you 
should be head carpenter, I the architect. The dif- 
ference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week 
against fifteen dollars a week." 

I took the place. 

II 

The office of the Evening Times was a queer old 
curiosity shop. I set to and turned it inside out. 
I had very pronounced journalistic notions of my 
own and applied them in every department of the 
sleepy old money-maker. One afternoon a week 
later I put forth a paper whose oldest reader could 
not have recognized it. The next morning's Cin- 
cinnati Commercial contained a flock of paragraphs 
to which the Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Eve- 
ning Times furnished the keynote. 

They made funny reading, but they threw a 
dangerous flare upon my "past" and put me at a 

[163] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

serious disadvantage. It happened that when 
Artemus Ward had been in town a fortnight before 
he gave me a dinner and had some of his friends to 
meet me. Among these was a young fellow of the 
name of Halstead, who, I was told, was the coming 
man on the Commercial. 

Round to the Commercial office I sped, and be- 
ing conducted to this person, who received me very 
blandly, I said: "Mr. Halstead, I am a journeyman 
day laborer in your city — the merest bird of pas- 
sage, with my watch at the pawnbroker's. As soon 
as I am able to get out of town I mean to go — and 
I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions 
to me in to-day's paper, which may lose me my job 
but can nowise hurt the Times, are quite fair — even 
— since I am without defense — quite manly." 

He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic 
stare which so became him, and with great heartiness 
replied: "No — they were damned mean — though 
I did not realize how mean. The mark was so 
obvious and tempting I could not resist, but — there 
shall be no more of them. Come, let us go and 
have a drink." 

That was the beginning of a friendship which 
brought happiness to both of us and lasted nearly 
[164] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

half a century, to the hour of his death, when, going 
from Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him 
away in Spring Grove Cemetery. 

I had no thought of remaining in Cincinnati. 
My objective was Nashville, where the young 
woman who was to become my wife, and whom I 
had not seen for nearly two years, was living with 
her family. During the summer Mr. Francisco, 
the business manager of the Evening Times, had 
a scheme to buy the Toledo Commercial, in con- 
junction with Mr. Comly, of Columbus, and to en- 
gage me as editor conjointly with Mr. Harrison 
Gray Otis as publisher. It looked very good. 
Toledo threatened Cleveland and Detroit as a lake 
port. But nothing could divert me. As soon as 
Parson Brownlow, who was governor of Tennessee 
and making things lively for the returning rebels, 
w^ould allow, I was going to Nashville. 

About the time the way was cleared my two 
pals, or bunkies, of the Confederacy, Albert Rob- 
erts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood, put 
in an appearance. They w^ere on their way to the 
capital of Tennessee. The father of Albert Rob- 
erts was chief owner of the Republican Banner, an 
old and highly respectable newspaper, which had 

[165J 



"MARSE HENRY" 

for nearly four years lain in a state of suspension. 
Their plan now was to revive its publication, Purvis 
to be busjness manager, and Albert and I to be 
editors. We had no cash. Nobody on our side of 
the line had any cash. But John Roberts owned a 
farm he could mortgage for money enough to start 
us. What had I to say? 

Less than a week later saw us back at home win- 
nowing the town for subscribers and advertising. 
We divided it into districts, each taking a specified 
territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight 
to see. But the way the community warmed to us 
was another. When the familiar headline, The 
Republican Banner, made its apearance there was 
a popular hallelujah, albeit there were five other 
dailies ahead of us. A year later there was only 
one, and it was nowise a competitor. 

Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, 
the niece of Huxley, whom I have before mentioned, 
in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis' girl, Sophie 
Searcy, was in Selma. Their hope was to have 
enough money by Christmas each to pay a visit to 
those distant places. JNIy girl was on the spot, and 
we had resolved, money or no money, to be married 
without delay. Before New Year's the three of us 
[166] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

were wedded and comfortably settled, with funds 
galore, for the paper had thrived consumingly. It 
had thrived so consumingly that after a little I was 
able to achieve the wish of my heart and to go to 
London, taking my wife and my "great American 
novel" with me. I have related elsewhere what 
came of this and what happened to me. 

in 

That bread cast upon the waters — " 'dough' put 
out at usance," as Joseph Jefferson used to phrase 
it — shall return after many days has been I dare 
say discovered by most persons who have perpe- 
trated acts of kindness, conscious or unconscious. 
There was a poor, broken-down Enghsh actor with 
a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to en- 
counter in the Library of Congress. His voice was 
quite gone. Now and again I had him join me in 
a square meal. Once in a while I paid his room 
rent. I was loath to leave him when the break came 
in 1861, though he declared he had "expectations," 
and made sure he would not starve. 

I was passing through Regent Street in London, 
when a smart brougham drove up to the curb and 
a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old 

[167] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

friend, Newton. His "expectations" had not failed 
him, he had come into a property and was Hving 
in affluence. 

♦ He knew London as only a Bohemian native 
and to the manner born could know it. His sense 
of bygone obhgation knew no bounds. Between 
him and John ^lahoney and Artemus Ward I was 
made at home in what might be called the mysteries 
and eccentricities of difiPering phases of life in the 
British metropolis not commonly accessible to the 
foreign casual. In many after visits this familiar 
knowledge has served me well. But Newton did 
not live to know of some good fortune that came 
to me and to feel my gratitude to him, as dear old 
John Mahoney did. When I was next in London 
he was gone. 

It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom 
I had in mind in oflPering a bread-upon-the-water 
moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of 
whom in my case illustrates it much better. He 
was a wit and a poet. He had been State Librarian 
of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of the 
service, though he was a sad cripple and wholly un- 
equal to its requirements. He fell ill. I had the 
opportunity to care for him. When the war was 
[168] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

over his old friend, George D. Prentice, called him 
to Louisville to take an editorial place on the 
Journal. 

About the same time Mr. Walter ITaldeman re- 
turned from the South and resumed the suspended 
publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in 
the prime of life, a man of surpassing energy, enter- 
prise and industry, and had with him the popular 
sympathy. JVIr. Prentice was nearly three score 
and ten. The stream had passed him by. The 
Journal was not only beginning to feel the strain 
but was losing ground. In this emergency Hatcher 
came to the rescue. I was just back from London 
and was doing noticeable work on the Nashville 
Banner. 

"Here is your man," said Hatcher to Mr. Pren- 
tice and Mr. Henderson, the owners of the Journal ; 
and I was invited to come to Louisville. 

After I had looked over the field and inspected 
the Journal's books I was satisfied that a union 
with the Courier was the wisest solution of the 
newspaper situation, and told them so. IMeanwhile 
Mr. Haldeman, whom I had known in the Confed- 
eracy, sent for me. He offered me the same terms 
for part ownership and sole editorship of the 

[169] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Courier, which the Journal people had offered me. 
This I could not accept, but proposed as an alterna- 
tive the consolidation of the two on an equal basis. 
He was willing enough for the consolidation, but 
not on equal terms. There was nothing for it but 
a jfight. I took the Journal and began to hammer 
the Courier. 

A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Hender- 
son had plenty of money and was willing to spend 
it. During the contest not an unkind word was 
printed on either side. After stripping the Journal 
to its heels it had very little to go on or to show for 
what had once been a prosperous business. But 
circulation flowed in. From eighten hundred daily 
it quickly mounted to ten thousand; from fifteen 
hundred weekly to fifty thousand. The middle of 
October it looked as if we had a straight road be- 
fore us. 

But I knew better. I had discovered that the 
field, no matter how worked, was not big enough to 
support two rival dailies. There was toward the 
last of October on the edge of town a real-estate 
sale which Mr. Haldeman and I attended. Here 
was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a 

hundred thousand dollars and did actually buy 
[170] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

nearly ten thousand dollars of the lots put up at 
auction, relying upon some money presently com- 
ing to my wife. 

I could see that it made an impression on Mr. 
Haldeman. Returning in the carriage which had 
brought us out I said: "Mr. Haldeman, I am going 
to ruin you. But I am going to run up a money 
obligation to I sham Henderson I shall never be 
able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a 
pubhsher. Let us put these two newspapers to- 
gether, buy the Democrat, and, instead of cutting 
one another's throats, go after Cincinnati and St. 
Louis. You will recall that I proposed this to you 
in the beginning. What is the matter with it 
now?" 

Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at 
once. The details were soon adjusted. Ten days 
later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city 
in place of the three familiar visitors, a double- 
headed stranger, calling itself the Courier-Journal. 
Our exclusive possession of the field thus acquired 
lasted two years. At the end of these we found that 
at least the appearance of competition was indis- 
pensable and willingly acepted an offer from a pro- 
posed Repubhcan organ for a division of the Press 

[171] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

dispatches which we controlled. Then and there 

the real prosperity of the Courier-Journal began, 

the paper having made no money out of its 

monopoly. 

IV 

Reconstruction, as it was called — ruin were a 
fitter name for it — ^had just begun. The South 
was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The 
Constitution of the United States himg in the 
balance. The Federal Union faced the threat of 
sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was 
martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in 
Congress. Radicalism, vitahzed by the murder of 
Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate 
effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies 
of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously to- 
ward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland. 

The Democratic Party, which, had it been 
stronger, might have interposed, lay helpless. It, 
too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, 
which had not been embraced by the military 
agencies and federalized machinery erected over 
the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never 
did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier 
auspices. 
[172] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, 
claiming to be Democratic, playing to the lead of 
the party of repression at the North. It refused 
to admit that the head of the South was in the 
lion's mouth and that the first essential was to get 
it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to stroke 
the mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it 
stood between two fires. There arose a not un- 
natural distrust of the journalistic monopoly 
created by the consolidation of the three former 
dailies into a single newspaper, carrying an un- 
familiar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy 
of sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously 
through the cross currents of public opinion. 
There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was not 
alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile 
device that was not undertaken to put it down and 
drive it out. 

Its constituency represented an unknown quan- 
tity. In any event it had to be created. ^Mean- 
while, it must rely upon its own resources, sustained 
by the courage of the venture, by the integrity of 
its convictions and aims, and by faith in the future 
of the city, the state and the country. 

Still, to be precise, it was the morning of Sun- 

[173] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

day, November 8, 1868. The night before the good 
people of Louisville had gone to bed expecting 
nothing unusual to happen. They awoke to en- 
counter an uninvited guest arrived a little before 
the dawn. No hint of its coming had got abroad; 
and thus the surprise was the greater. Truth to 
say, it was not a pleased surprise, because, as it 
flared before the eye of the startled citizen in big 
Gothic letters. The Courier-Journal, there issued 
thence an aggressive self-confidence which affronted 
the amour propre of the sleepy villagers. They 
were used to a very different style of newspaper 
approach. 

Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its 
only offense. The Courier had its partisans, the 
Journal and the Democrat had their friends. The 
trio stood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and 
familiar institutions. Here was a double-headed 
monster which, without saying "by your leave" or 
"blast your eyes" or any other politeness, had taken 
possession of each man's doorstep, looking very like 
it had brought its knitting and was come to stay. 

The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the 
Courier by Mr. Haldeman and the Democrat by 
Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards 
[174] 



**MARSE HENRY" 

of those days successful newspapers. But the War 
of Sections had made many changes. At its close 
new conditions appeared on every side. A revolu- 
tion had come into the business and the spirit of 
American journalism. 

In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a 
generation struggled for the right of way. Yet 
Louisville was a city of the tenth or twelfth class, 
having hardly enough patronage to sustain one 
daily newspaper of the first or second class. The 
idea of consolidating the three thus contending to 
divide a patronage so insufficient, naturally sug- 
gested itself during the years immediately succeed- 
ing the war. But it did not take definite shape 
until 1868. 

Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat 
picturesque and not altogether profitable pursuit 
of his "rights in the territories" and had resumed 
the suspended publication of the Courier with en- 
couraging prospects. I had succeeded Mr. Pren- 
tice in the editorship and part ownership of the 
Journal. Both INIr. Haldeman and I were news- 
paper men to the manner born and bred; old and 
good friends; and after our rivalry of six months 
maintained with activity on both sides, but without 

[175] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the publication of an unkind word on either, a 
union of forces seemed exigent. To practical men 
the need of this was not a debatable question. All 
that was required was an adjustment of the details. 
Beginning with the simple project of joining the 
Courier and the Journal, it ended by the purchase 
of the Democrat, which it did not seem safe to 
leave outside. 

The political conditions in Kentucky were anoma- 
lous. The Repubhcan Party had not yet definitely 
taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had 
held to the Government — to save their slaves — 
resenting Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, 
had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the- 
war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. 
The party in power called itself Democratic, but 
was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts 
claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretend- 
ing to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of 
other days. 

The situation may be the better understood when 

I add that "negro testimony" — the introduction to 

the courts of law of the newly made freedmen as 

witnesses — ^barred by the state constitution, was the 

[176] 



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' MARSE HENRY" 

burning issue. A murder committed in the pres- 
ence of a thousand negroes could not be lawfully 
proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to 
a cake of soap might be cited before a jury, but 
not a human being if his skin happened to be black. 

To my mind this was monstrous. From my 
cradle I had detested slavery. The North will 
never know how many people at the South did so. 
I could not go with the Republican Party, how- 
ever, because after the death of Abraham Lincoln 
it had intrenched itself in the proscription of South- 
ern men. The attempt to form a third party had 
shown no strength and had broken down. There 
w^as nothing for me, and the Confederates who were 
with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn 
by a riffraff of opportunists, Jeffersonian prin- 
ciples having quite gone to seed. But I proposed 
to lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in be- 
hind the selfish and short-sighted time servers who 
thought the people had learned nothing and forgot 
nothing; and instant upon finding myself in the 
saddle I sought to ride down the mass of ignorance 
which was at least for the time being mainly what 
I had to look to for a constituency. 

Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground 

[177] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

better than I did, advised against it. The personal 
risk counted for something. Very early in the ac- 
tion I made a direct fighting issue, which — the com- 
bat interdicted — gave me the opportunity to de- 
clare — with something of the bully in the tone — 
that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten 
paces, but could shoot with any man in Kentucky 
across a pocket handkerchief, holding myself at all 
times answerable and accessible. I had a fairly 
good fighting record in the army and it was not 
doubted that I meant what I said. 

But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for 
a long while against odds, before negro testimony 
was carried. A generation of politicians were sent 
to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State 
Convention put its mark upon me as a Democrat 
by appointing me a Delegate at large to the Na- 
tional Democratic Convention of that year called 
to meet at St. Louis to put a Presidential ticket 
in the field. 

The Courier-Journal having come to represent 
all three of the English dailies of the city the public 
began to rebel. It could not see that instead of three 
newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville 
was given one newspaper of the first class ; that in- 
[178] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

stead of dividing the local patronage in three 
inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple competi- 
tion, this patronage was combined, enabling the 
one newspaper to engage in a more equal competi- 
tion with the newspapers of such rival and larger 
cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis ; and that one of 
the contracting parties needing an editor, the other 
a publisher, in coming together the two were able 
to put their trained faculties to the best account. 
Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. 
Haldeman and I labored side by side, not the 
least difference having arisen between us. The 
attacks to which we were subjected from time to 
time drew us together the closer. These attacks 
were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical, 
but they had one characteristic feature: Each 
started out apparently under a high state of excite- 
ment. Each seemed to have some profound cause 
of grief, to be animated by implacable hate and to 
aim at nothing short of annihilation. Frequently 
the assailants would lie in wait to see how the 
Courier- Journal's cat was going to jump, in order 
that they might take the other side ; and invariably, 
even if the Courier-Journal stood for the reforms 
they affected to stand for, they began a system of 

[179] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did 
they attain any success. 

Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, 
and the dark and tragic days that followed it the 
three or four succeeding years, the paper having 
stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, 
for sound money, was the property in danger. It 
cost more of labor and patience to save it from 
destruction than it had cost to create it thirty years 
before. Happily ]Mr. Haldeman lived to see the 
rescue complete, the tide turned and the future safe. 

VI 

A newspaper, like a woman, must not only be 
honest, but must seem to be honest; acts of levity, 
loose unbecoming expressions or behavior — though 
never so innocent — tending in the one and in the 
other to lower reputation and discredit character. 
During my career I have proceeded under a con- 
fident belief in this principle of newspaper ethics 
and an unfailing recognition of its mandates. I 
truly believe that next after business integrity in 
newspaper management comes disinterestedness in 
the public service, and next after disinterestedness 
come moderation and intelligence, cleanliness and 
[180] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

good feeling, in dealing with affairs and its read- 
ers. 

From that blessed Sunday morning, November 
8, 1868, to this good day, I have known no other 
life and had no other aim. Those were indeed 
parlous times. It was an era of transition. Upon 
the field of battle, after four years of deadly but 
unequal combat, the North had vanquished the 
South. The victor stood like a giant, with blood 
aflame, eyes dilate and hands uplifted again to 
strike. The victim lay prostrate. Save self-respect 
and manhood all was lost. Clasping its memories 
to its bosom the South sank helpless amid the wreck 
of its fortunes, whilst the North, the benign in- 
fluence of the great Lincoln withdrawn, proceeded 
to decide its fate. To this ghastly end had come 
slavery and secession, and all the pomp, pride and 
circumstance of the Confederacy. To this bitter 
end had come the soldiership of Lee and Jackson 
and Johnston and the myriads of brave men who 
followed them. 

The single Constitutional barrier that had stood 
between the people of the stricken section and 
political extinction was about to be removed by the 
exit of Andrew Johnson from the White House. 

[181] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

In his place a man of blood and iron — for such was 
the estimate at that time placed upon Grant — ^had 
been elected President. The Republicans in Con- 
gress, checked for a time by Johnson, were at 
length to have entire sway under Thaddeus Stev- 
ens. Reconstruction was to be thorough and 
merciless. To meet these conditions was the first 
requirement of the Courier-Journal, a newspaper 
conducted by outlawed rebels and published on the 
sectional border line. The task was not an easy 
one. 

There is never a cause so weak that it does not 
stir into ill-timed activity some wild, unpractical 
zealots who imagine it strong. There is never a 
cause so just but that the malevolent and the mer- 
cenary will seek to trade upon it. \J^he South was 
helpless ; the one thing needful was to get it on its 
feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw this 
plainly enough there came to the front — particu- 
larly in Kentucky — a small but noisy body of poli- 
ticians who had only worked themselves into a state 
of war when it was too late, and who with more or 
less of aggression, insisted that "the states lately in 
rebellion" still had rights, which they were able to 
[182] 



"MARSE HENRY'* 

maintain and which the North could be forced to 
respect. 

I was of a different opinion. It seemed to me 
that whatever of right might exist the South was 
at the mercy of the North; that the radical party 
led by Stevens and Wade dominated the North 
and could dictate its own terms ; and that the short- 
est way round lay in that course which was best 
calculated to disarm radicalism by an intelligent 
appeal to the business interests and conservative 
elements of Northern society, supported by a 
domestic pohcy of justice alike to whites and 
blacks. 

Though the institution of African slavery was 
gone the negro continued the subject of savage 
contention. I urged that he be taken out of the 
arena of agitation, and my way of taking him out 
was to concede him his legal and civil rights. The 
lately ratified Constitutional Amendments, I con- 
tended, were the real Treaty of Peace between the 
North and South. The recognition of these Amend- 
ments in good faith by the white people of the 
South was indispensable to that perfect peace 
which was desired by the best people of both sec- 
tions. The political emancipation of the blacks was 

[183] 



**MAIISE HENRY" 

essential to the moral emancipation of the whites. 
With the disappearence of the negro question as 
cause of agitation^ I argued, radicalism of the in- 
tense, proscriptive sort would die out; the liberty- 
loving, patriotic people of the North would assert 
themselves ; and, this one obstacle to a better under- 
standing removed, the restoration of Constitu- 
tional Government would follow, being a matter of 
momentous concern to the body of the people both 
North and South. 

Such a policy of conciliation suited the Southern 
extremists as little as it suited the Northern ex- 
tremists. It took from the politicians their best 
card. South no less than North, "the bloody shirt" 
was trumps. It could always be played. It was 
easy to play it and it never failed to catch the un- 
thinking and to arouse the excitable. What cared 
the perennial candidate so he got votes enough? 
What cared the professional agitator so his appeals 
to passion brought him his audience? 

It is a fact that until Lamar delivered his eulogy 
on Sumner not a Southern man of prominence 
used language calculated to placate the North, and 
between Lamar and Grady there was an interval 
of fifteen years. There was not a Democratic press 
[184] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

worthy the name either North or South. During 
those evil days the Courier- Journal stood alone, 
having no party or organized following. At length 
it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. 
Then Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then came 
the great liberal movement of 1871-72, with its 
brilliant but ill-starred campaign and its tragic 
finale; and then there set in what, for a season, 
seemed the deluge. 

But the cause of Constitutional Government was 
not dead. It had been merely dormant. Cham- 
pions began to appear in unexpected quarters. New 
men spoke up, North and South. In spite of the 
Republican landslide of 1872, in 1874 the Demo- 
crats swept the Empire State. They carried the 
popular branch of Congress by an overwhelming 
majority. In the Senate they had a respectable mi- 
nority, with Thurman and Bayard to lead it. In 
the House Randall and Kerr and Cox, Lamar, 
Beck and Knott were about to be reenforced by 
Hill and Tucker and INIills and Gibson. The logic 
of events was at leng-th subduinoj the rodomontade 
of soap-box oratory. Empty rant was to yield to 
reason. For all its mischances and melancholy end- 
ing the Greeley campaign had shortened the dis- 
tance across the bloody chasm. 

[185] 



CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 

FEMINISM AND WOMAN SUFFRAGE — THE ADVEN- 
TURESS IN POLITICS AND SOCIETY — A REAL 

HEROINE 

I 

IT WOULD not be the writer of this narrative 
if he did not interject certain opinions of his 
own which parties and poHticians, even his news- 
paper colleagues, have been wont to regard as 
peculiar. By common repute he has been an all- 
round old-line Democrat of the regulation sort. 
Yet on the three leading national questions of the 
last fifty years — the Negro question, the Greenback 
question and the Free Silver question — he has 
challenged and antagonized the general direction 
of that party. He takes some pride to himself that 
in each instance the result vindicated alike his fore- 
cast and his insubordination. 

To one who witnessed the break-up of the Whig 
party in 1853 and of the Democratic Party in 1860 
the plight in which parties find themselves at this 
[186] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

time may be described as at least, suggestive. The 
feeling is at once to laugh and to whistle. Too much 
"fuss and feathers" in Winfield Scott did the busi- 
ness for the Whigs. Too much "bearded lady" in 
Charles Evans Hughes perhaps cooked the goose 
of the Republicans. Too much Wilson — but let me 
not fall into Use majeste. The Whigs went into 
Know-Nothingism and Free Soilism. Will the 
Democrats go into Prohibition and paternalism? 
And the Republicans 

The old sectional alignment of North and South 
has been changed to East and West. 

For the time being the politicians of both 
parties are in something of a funk. It is the nature 
of parties thus situate to fancy that there is no 
hereafter, riding in their dire confusion headlong 
for a fall. Little other than the labels being left, 
nobody can tell what will happen to either. 

Progressivism seems the cant of the indifferent. 
Accentuated by the indecisive vote in the elections 
and heralded by an ambitious President who writes 
Humanity bigger than he writes the United States, 
and is accused of aspiring to world leadership, 
democracy unterrified and undefiled — the democ- 
racy of Jefferson, Jackson and Tilden an- 

[187] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

cient history — has become a back number. Yet our 
officials still swear to a Constitution. We have not 
eliminated state lines. State rights are not wholly 
dead. 

The fight between capital and labor is on. No 
one can predict where it will end. Shall it prove 
another irrepressible conflict? Are its issues irre- 
concilable? Must the alternative of the future lie 
between Socialism and Civil War, or both? Prog- 
ress! Progress! Shall there be no stability in 
either actualities or principles? And — and — what 
about the Bolsheviki? 

II 

Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. 
Like machines they get out of whack and line. 
First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and 
then the Democrats. Then came the Republicans. 
* And then, after a long interruption, the Democrats 
again. English political experience repeats itself 
in America. 

A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is 

to a nostrum. It becomes in time an asset. We 

are told that a fool is born every minute, and, the 

average man being something of a fool, the label 

[188] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

easily catches him. Hence the Democratic Party 
and the RepubHcan Party. 

The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks 
of sectionalism. The institution of African slavery 
arrived upon the scene at length as the paramount 
political issue. The North, which brought the 
Africans here in its ships, finding slave labor un- 
profitable, sold its slaves to the South at a good 
price, and turned pious. The South took the bait 
and went crazy. 

Finally, we had a pretty kettle of fish. Just as 
the Prohibitionists are going to convert mortals 
into angels overnight by act of assembly — or still 
better, by Constitutional amendment — were the 
short-haired women and the long-haired men of 
Boston going to make a white man out of the black 
man by Abolition. The Southern Whigs could not 
see it and would not stand for it. So they fell in 
behind the Democrats. The Northern Whigs, hav- 
ing nowhere else to go, joined the Republicans. 

The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. 
The North was warned that the South would fight, 
the South, that if it did it went against incredible 
odds. Neither would take the warning. Party 
spirit ran wild. Extremism had its fling. Thus a 

[189] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

long, bloody and costly War of Sections — a 
fraternal war if ever there was one — brought on by 
alternating intolerance, the politicians of both 
sides gambling upon the credulity and ignorance of 
the people. 

Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than fore- 
sight. It comes easier and shows clearer. Any- 
body can now see that the slavery problem might 
have had a less ruinous solution; that the moral 
issue might have been compromised from time to 
time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor even 
at the South had shown itself illusory, costly and 
clumsy. The institution untenable, modern thought 
against it, from the first it was doomed. 

But the extremists would not have it. Each 
played to the lead of the other. Whilst Wendell 
Phillips was preaching the equality of races, death 
to the slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at 
the North, William Lowndes Yancey was exclaim- 
ing that cotton was king at the South, and, to es- 
tablish these false propositions, millions of good 
Americans proceeded to cut one another's throats. 

There were agitators and agitators in those days 
as there are in these. The agitator, like the poor, 
we have always with us. It used to be said even at 
[190] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever 
comedian. William Lowndes Yancey was scarcely 
that. He was a serious, sincere, untraveled pro- 
vincial, possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He 
had the misfortune to kill a friend in a duel when 
a young man, and the tragedy shadowed his life. 
He clung to his plantation and rarely went away 
from home. When sent to Europe by the South as 
its Ambassador in 1861, he discovered the futility 
of his scheme of a Southern confederacy, and, see- 
ing the cornerstone of the philosophy on which he 
had constructed his pretty fabric, overthrown, he 
came home despairing, to die of a broken heart. 

The moral ahke for governments and men is: 
Keep the middle of the road. 

Ill 

Which brings us to Feminism. I will not write 
Woman Suffrage, for that is an accomplished fact 
— for good or evil we shall presently be better able 
to determine. 

Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers — 
saving that the word presses somewhat harder upon 
the woman than the man — most things do in fact, 
whereby she is given greater endurance — leavmg to 

[191] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

men the duty of caring for the women; and, if 
need be, looking death squarely and defiantly in 
the face. 

The world often puts the artificial before the 
actual ; but under the dispensation of the Christian 
civilization — derived from the Hebraic — the family 
requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. 
This male is commonly not much to speak of for 
beauty of form or decency of behavior. He is 
made purposely tough for work and fight. He 
gets toughened by outer contact. But back of all 
are the women, the children and the home. 

I have been fighting the woman's battle for 
equality in the things that count, all my life. I 
would despise myself if I had not been. In con- 
testing precipitate universal suffrage for women, 
I conceived that I was still fighting the woman's 
battle. 

We can escape none of Nature's laws. But we 
need not handicap ourselves with artificial laws. 
At best, life is an experiment. Death the final ad- 
venture. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; 
still we may not call the woman who assails the 
soap boxes — even those that antic about the White 
House gates — by the opprobrious terms of ad- 
[192] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

venturess. Where such a one is not a hmatic she is 
a nuisance. There are women and women. 

We may leave out of account the shady ladies of 
history. Neither Aspasia nor Lucrezia Borgia 
nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with ac- 
curacy be called an adventuress. The term is of 
later date. Its origin and growth have arisen out 
of the complexities of modern society. 

In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come 
in for first honors — in each the leopard crossed on 
the serpent and united under a petticoat, beauti- 
ful and wicked — but since the Balzac and Dumas 
days the story-tellers and stage-mongers have made 
exceeding free with the type, and we have between 
Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and 
Victorien Sardou's Zica a very theater — or shall 
we say a charnel house — of the woman with the 
past; usually portrayed as the victim of circum- 
stance; unprincipled through cruel experience; in- 
sensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, 
but a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as 
iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends 
with force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance 
of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, 
capable of self-pity, yielding anon in moments of 

[193] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness 
and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost. 

Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in 
real life. But many pretenders may be encountered 
at Monte Carlo and other European resorts. They 
range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her 
chic apparel, to the fashionable divorcee who in try- 
ing her luck at the tables keeps a sharp lookout for 
the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the 
enterprising sport who has been there before. 

These are out and out professional adventuresses. 
There are other adventuresses, however, than those 
of the story and the stage, the casino and the 
cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the 
girl with the future. 

Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost ex- 
clusively, recruited from our countrywomen, v/ho to 
an abnormal passion for foreign titles join surpass- 
ing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready 
to the hand of the Continental fortune seeker 
masquerading as a nobleman — occasionally but not 
often the black sheep of some noble family — carry- 
ing not a bona fide but a courtesy title — the count 
and the no-account, the lord and the Lord knows 
who! The Yankee girl with a dot had become be- 
[194] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

fore the world war a regular quarry for impecu- 
nious aristocrats and clever crooks, the matrimo- 
nial results tragic in their frequency and squalor. 

Another curious circumstance is the readiness 
with which the American newspaper tumbles to 
these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates 
in them: woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the 
jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big 
money interchanged ; glows over the tin-plate stars 
and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and 
keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not 
forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, 
and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old 
story over again. 

These newspapers ring all the sensational 
changes. Now it is the wondrous beauty with the 
cool million, who, having married some illegitimate 
of a minor royal house, will probably be the next 
Queen of Rigmarolia, and now — ever increasing 
the dose — it is the ten-million-dollar widow who is 
going to marry the King of Pontarabia's brother, 
and may thus aspire to be one day Empress of 
Sahara. 

Old European travelers can recall many funny 
and sometimes melancholy incidents — episodes — 

[195] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

histories — of which they have witnessed the begin- 
ning and the end, carrying the self-same denoue- 
ment and lesson. 

IV 

As there are women and women there are many 
kinds of adventuresses ; not all of them wicked and 
detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the ad- 
venturess is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with 
a future or a woman with a past she is still a woman, 
and the world can never be too kind to its women — 
the child bearers, the home makers, the moral light 
of the universe as they meet the purpose of God 
and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing 
themselves in order that they may keep step with 
man in ways of self-indulgent dalliance. The ad- 
venturess of fiction always comes to grief. But 
the adventuress in real life — the prudent ad- 
venturess who draws the line at adultery — the 
would-be leader of society without the wealth — 
the would-be political leader without the masculine 
fiber — is sure of disappointment in the end. 

Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it 
that the woman suffragette expects to get? No 
one of them can, or does, clearly tell us. 
[196] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is 
dangerous. Now that they have it, my fear is that 
the leaders will not stop with the ballot for women. 
They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become 
a necessity for them. If all women should fall in 
with them there would be nothing of womanhood 
left, and the world bereft of its women will become 
a masculine harlotocracy. 

Let me repeat that I have been fighting wom- 
an's battles in one way and another all my life. 
I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I 
would discriminate and educate, and even at that 
rate I would limit the franchise to actual taxpayers, 
and, outside of these, confine it to charities, correc- 
tions and schools, keeping woman away from the 
dirt of politics. I do not believe the ballot will 
benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in 
seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the 
women who favor it are off their reckoning! I 
doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though 
somehow, when the hikers started from New York 
to Albany, and afterward from New York to 
Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von 
Hillern came back to me. 

I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it 

[197] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

makes a pretty story let me tell it. Many 
years ago — don't ask me how many — there was a 
young woman, Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor 
art student seeking money enough to take her 
abroad, who engaged with the management of a 
hall in Louisville to walk one hundred miles around 
a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours. 
She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was 
told, amounted to three thousand dollars. 

I shall never forget the closing scenes of the 
wondrous test of courage and endurance. She was a 
pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but 
shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without 
much diminution, though with intermittent changes, 
had watched her from start to finish, began to grow 
tense with the approach to the end, and the last 
hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave 
upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of 
the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as 
the final lap was reached. 

More dead than alive, but game to the core, the 
little heroine was carried off the field, a winner, 
every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every 
eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not 
possible adequately to describe all that happened. 
[198] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

One must have been there and seen it fully to com- 
prehend the glory of it. 

Touching the recent Albany and Washington 
hikes and hikers let me say at once that I cannot 
approve the cause of Votes for women as I had ap- 
proved the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where 
she showed heroic, most of the suffragettes appear 
to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, 
their aim has been visionary. To me the younger 
of them seem as children who need to be spanked 
and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole 
Suffrage business something pitiful and comic. 

Often I have felt like swearing "You idiots!" 
and then like crying "Poor dears!" But I have 
kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or 
Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones 
in my arms, and before she could say "Jack Robin- 
son" have exclaimed: "You ridiculous child, go and 
get a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come 
and join us at dinner in the State Banquet Hall, 
duly made and provided for you and the rest of you 
delightful sillies." 



[199] 



CHAPTER THE NINTH 

DR. NORVIN GREEN JOSEPH PULITZER CHESTER A. 

ARTHUR — GENERAL GRANT — THE CASE OF FITZ 
JOHN PORTER 

I 

TRUTH we are told is stranger than fiction. 
I have found it so in the knowledge which has 
variously come to me of many interesting men and 
women. Of these Dr. Norvin Green was a striking 
example. To have sprung from humble parentage 
in the wilds of Kentucky and to die at the head of 
the most potential corporation in the world — to 
have held this place against all comers by force of 
abilities deemed indispensable to its welfare — to 
have gone the while his ain gait, disdaining the pre- 
cepts of Doctor Franklin — who, by the way, did 
not trouble overmuch to follow them himself — 
seems so unusual as to rival the most stirring stories 
of the novel mongers. 

When I first met Doctor Green he was president 
of a Kentucky railway company. He had been, 
[200] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

however, one of the organizers of the Western 
Union Telegraph Company. He deluded himself 
for a little by political ambitions. He wanted to 
go to the Senate of the United States, and during 
a legislative session of prolonged balloting at 
Frankfort he missed his election by a single vote. 

It may be doubted whether he would have cut a 
considerable figure at Washington. His talents 
were constructive rather than declamatory. He 
was called to a greater field — though he never 
thought it so — and was foremost among those who 
developed the telegraph system of the country al- 
most from its infancy. He possessed the daring 
of the typical Kentuckian, with the dead calm of 
the stoic philosopher; imperturbable; never vexed 
or querulous or excited; denying himself none of 
the indulgences of the gentleman of leisure. We 
grew to be constant comrades and friends, and when 
he returned to New York to take the important 
post which to the end of his days he filled so com- 
pletely his office in the Western Union Building be- 
came my downtown headquarters. 

There I met Jay Gould familiarly ; and resumed 
acquaintance with Russell Sage, whom I had known 
when a lad in Washington, he a hayseed member 

[201] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

of Congress; and occasionally other of the Wall 
Street leaders. In a small way — though not for 
long — I caught the stock-gambling fever. But I 
was on the "inside," and it was a cold day when I 
did not "clean up" a goodly amount to waste up- 
town in the evening. I may say that I gave this 
over through sheer disgust of acquiring so much 
and such easy and useless money, for, having no 
natural love of money — no aptitude for making 
money breed — no taste for getting it except to 
spend it — earning by my own accustomed and 
fruitful toil always a sufficiency — the distractions 
and dissipations it brought to my annual vacations 
and occasional visits, affronted in a way my self- 
respect, and palled upon my rather eager quest of 
pleasure. Money is purely relative. The root of 
all evil, too. Too much of it may bring ills as 
great as not enough. 

At the outset of my stock-gambling experience 
I was one day in the office of President Edward 
H. Green, of the Louisville and Nashville Rail- 
way, no relation of Dr. Norvin Green, but the hus- 
band of the famous Hetty Green. He said to me, 
How are you in stocks?" 

What do you mean?" said L 
[202] 






"MARSE HENRY" 

"Why," he said, "do you buy long, or short? Are 
you lucky or unlucky?" 

"You are talking Greek to me," I answered. 

"Didn't you ever put up any money on a mar- 
gm? 

"Never." 

"Bless me! You are a virgin. I want to try 
your luck. Look over this stock list and pick a 
stock. I will take a crack at it. All I make we'll 
divide, and all we lose I'll pay." 

"Will you leave this open for an hour or two?" 

"What is the matter with it — is it not liberal 

enough?" 

"The matter is that I am going over to the West- 
ern Union to lunch. The Gould party is to sit in 
with the Orton-Green party for the first time after 
their fight, and I am asked especially to be there. 
I may pick up something." 

Big Green, as he was called, paused a moment 
reflectively. "I don't want any tip — especially 
from that bunch," said he. "I want to try your 
virgin luck. But, go ahead, and let me know this 
afternoon." 

At luncheon I sat at Doctor Green's right, Jay 
Gould at his left. For the first and last time in its 

[203] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

history wine was served at this board; Russell Sage 
was effusive in his demonstrations of affection and 
went on with his stories of my boyhood ; every one 
sought to take the chill off the occasion ; and we had 
a most enjoyable time instead of what promised to 
be rather a frosty formality. When the rest had 
departed, leaving Doctor Green, Mr. Gould and 
mvself at table, mindful of what I had come for, in 
a bantering way I said to Doctor Green: "Now 
that I am a Wall Street ingenu, why don't you tell 
me something?" 

Gould leaned across the table and said in his 
velvet voice: "Buy Texas Pacific." 

Two or three days after, Texas Pacific fell off 
sixty points or more. I did not see Big Green 
again. Five or six months later I received from 
him a statement of account which I could never 
have unraveled, with a check for some thousands of 
dollars, my one-half profit on such and such an 
operation. Texas Pacific had come back again. 

Two or three years later I sat at Doctor Green's 
table with ]Mr. Gould, just as we had sat the first 
day. Mr. Gould recalled the circumstance. 

"I did not think I could afford to have you 
lose on my suggestion and I went to cover your 
[204] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

loss, when I found five thousand shares of Texas 
Pacific transferred on the books of the company 
in your name. I knew these could not be yours. I 
thought the buyer was none other than the man I 
was after, and I began hammering the stock. I 
have been curious ever since to make sure whether 
I was right." 

"Whom did you suspect, Mr. Gould?" I asked. 

"My suspect was Victor Newcomb," he replied. 

I then told him what had happened. "Dear, 
dear," he cried. "Ned Green! Big Green. Well, 
well! You do surprise me. I would rather have 
done him a favor than an injury. I am rejoiced to 
learn that no harm was done and that, after all, 
you and he came out ahead." 

It was about this time Jay Gould had bought of 
the Thomas A. Scott estate a New York daily 
newspaper which, in spite of brilliant writers like 
Manton Marble and William Henry Hurlbut, had 
never been a moneymaker. This was the World. 
He offered me the editorship with forty-nine of the 
hundred shares of stock on very easy terms, which 
nowise tempted me. But two or three years after, 
I daresay both weary and hopeless of putting up 
so much money on an unyielding investment, he 

[205] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

was willing to sell outright, and Joseph Pulitzer 
became the purchaser. 

His career is another illustration of the saying 
that truth is stranger than fiction. 

II 

Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly 
at the Liberal Republican Convention, which met 
at Cincinnati in 1872 — the convocation of cranks, as 
it was called — and nominated Horace Greeley for 
President. He was a delegate from Missouri. 
Subsequent events threw us much together. He 
began his English newspaper experience after a 
kind of apprenticeship on a German daily with 
Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of 
those days. It was from Stilson Hutchins that I 
learned something of Puhtzer's origin and begin- 
nings, for he never spoke much of himself. 

According to this story he was the offspring of 
a runaway marriage between a subaltern officer in 
the Austrian service and a Hungarian lady of noble 
birth. In some way he had got across the Atlantic, 
and being in Boston, a wizened youth not speaking 
a word of English, he was spirited on board a war- 
ship. Watching his chance of escape he leaped 
[206] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

overboard in the darkness of night, though it was 
the dead of winter, and swam ashore. He was 
found unconscious on the beach by some charitable 
persons, who cared for him. Thence he tramped it 
to St. Louis, where he heard there was a German 
colony, and found work on a coal barge. 

It was here that the journalistic instinct dawned 
upon him. He began to carry river news items to 
the Westliche Post, which presently took him on its 
staff of regular reporters. 

The rest was easy. He learned to speak and 
write English, was transferred to the i3aper of 
which Hutchins was the head, and before he was 
five-and-twenty became a local figure. 

When he turned up in New York with an offer 
to purchase the World we met as old friends. Dur- 
ing the interval between 1872 and 1883 we had had 
a runabout in Europe and I was able to render him 
assistance in the purchase proceeding he was having 
with Gould. When this was completed he said to 
me: "You are at entire leisure; you are worse than 
that, you are wasting your time about the clubs and 
watering places, doing no good for yourself, or any- 
body else. I must first devote myself to the reor- 
ganization of the business end of it. Here is a blank 

[207] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

check. Fill it for whatever amount you please and 
it will be honored. I want you to go upstairs and 
organize my editorial force for me." 

Indignantly I replied: "Go to the devil — you 
have not money enough — there is not money enough 
in the universe — to buy an hour of my season's 
loaf." 

A year later I found him occupying with his fam- 
ily a splendid mansion up the Hudson, with a great 
stable of carriages and horses, living like a country 
gentleman, going to the World office about time for 
luncheon and coming away in the early afternoon. 
I passed a week-end with him. To me it seemed 
the precursor of ruin. His second payment was 
yet to be made. Had I been in his place I would 
have been taking my meals in an adjacent hotel, 
sleeping on a cot in one of the editorial rooms and 
working fifteen hours out of the twenty-four. To 
me it seemed dollars to doughnuts that he would 
break down and go to smash. But he did not — an- 
other case of destiny. 

I was abiding with my family at Monte Carlo, 

when in his floating palace, the Liberty, he came 

into the harbor of Me^ Lone. Then he bought a 

shore palace at Cup Martin. That season, and the 

[208] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

next two or three seasons, we made voyages to- 
gether from one end to the other of the Mediter- 
ranean, visiting the islands, especially Corsica and 
Elba, shrines of Napoleon whom he greatly ad- 
mired. 

He was a model host. He had surrounded him- 
self with every luxury, including some agreeable re- 
tainers, and lived like a prince aboard. His blind- 
ness had already overtaken him. Other physical 
ailments assailed him. But no word of complaint 
escaped his lips and he rarely failed to sit at the 
head of his table. It was both splendid and pitiful. 

Absolute authority made Pulitzer a tyrant. He 
regarded his newspaper ownership as an autocracy. 
There was nothing gentle in his domination, nor, I 
might say, generous either. He seriously lacked the 
sense of humor, and even among his familiars could 
never take a joke. His love of money was by no 
means inordinate. He spent it freely though not 
wastefully or joyously, for the possession of it 
rather flattered his vanity than made occasion for 
pleasure. Ability of varying kinds and degrees he 
had, a veritable genius for journalism and a real 
capacity for affection. He held his friends at good 
account and liked to have them about him. During 

[209] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the early days of his success he was disposed to 
overindulgence, not to say conviviality. He was 
fond of Rhine wines and an excellent judge of 
them, keeping a varied assortment always at hand. 
Once, upon the Liberty, he observed that I pre- 
ferred a certain vintage. "You like this wine?" he 
said inquiringly. I assented, and he said, "I have 
a lot of it at home, and when I get back I will send 
you some." I had quite forgotten when, many 
months after, there came to me a crate containing 
enough to last me a life-time. 

He had a retentive memory and rarely forgot 
anything. I could recall many pleasurable inci- 
dents of our prolonged and varied intimacy. We 
were one day wandering about the Montmartre re- 
gion of Paris when we came into a hole-in-the-wall 
where they were playing a piece called "Les Bri- 
gands." It was melodrama to the very marrow of 
the bones of the Apaches that gathered and glared 
about. In those days, the "indemnity" paid and 
the "military occupation" withdrawn, everything 
French pre-figured hatred of the German, and be 
sure "Les Brigands" made the most of this; each 
"brigand" a beer-guzzling Teuton; each hero a 
dare-devil Gaul; and, when Joan the Maid, hero- 
[210] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ine, sent Goetz von Berlichingen, the Vandal 
Chieftain, sprawling in the saw-dust, there was 
no end to the enthusiasm. 

"We are all 'brigands'," said Pulitzer as we came 
away, "differing according to individual character, 
to race and pursuit. Now, if I were writing that 
play, I should represent the villain as a tyrannous 
City Editor, meanly executing the orders of a 
niggardly proprietor." 

"And the heroine?" I said. 

"She should be a beautiful and rich young lady," 
he replied, "who buys the newspaper and marries 
the cub — rescuing genius from poverty and perse- 
cution." 

He was not then the owner of the World. He 
had not created the Post-Dispatch, or even met the 
beautiful woman who became his wife. He was a 
youngster of five or six and twenty, revisiting the 
scenes of his boyhood on the beautiful blue Danube, 
and taking in Paris for a lark. 



Ill 



I first met General Grant in my own house. I 
had often been invited to his house. As far back as 
1870 John Russell Young, a friend from boyhood, 

[211] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

came with an invitation to pass the week-end as 
the President's guest at Long Branch. Many of 
my friends had cottages there. Of afternoons and 
evenings they played an infinitesimal game of draw 
poker. 

"John," my answer was, "I don't dare to do so. 
I know that I shall fall in love with General Grant. 
We are living in rough times — particularly in 
rough party times. We have a rough presidential 
campaign ahead of us. If I go down to the seashore 
and go in swimming and play penny-ante with Gen- 
eral Grant I shall not be able to do my duty." 

It was thus that after the general had gone out 
of office and made the famous journey round the 
world, and had come to visit relatives in Kentucky, 
that he accepted a dinner invitation from me, and 
I had a number of his friends to meet him. 

Among these were Dr. Richardson, his early 
schoolmaster when the Grant family lived at Mays- 
ville, and Walter Haldeman, my business partner, 
a Maysville boy, who had been his schoolmate at 
the Richardson Academy, and General Cerro Gor- 
do Williams, then one of Kentucky's Senators in 
Congress, and erst his comrade and chum when 
both were lieutenants in the Mexican War. The 
[212] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

bars were down, the windows were shut and there 
was no end of hearty hikirity. Dr. Richardson had 
been mentioned by Mr. Haldeman as "the only man 
that ever licked Grant," and the general promptly 
retorted "he never licked me," when the good old 
doctor said, "No, Ulysses, I never did — nor Walter, 
either — for you two were the best boys in school." 

I said "General Grant, why not give up this 
beastly politics, buy a blue-grass farm, and settle 
down to horse-raising and tobacco growing in Ken- 
tucky?" And, quick as a flash — for both he and the 
company perceived that it was "a leading question" 
—he rephed, "Before I can buy a farm in Kentucky 
I shall have to sell a farm in Missouri," which left 
nothing further to be said. 

There was some sparring between him and Gen- 
eral Williams over their youthful adventures. 
Finally General Williams, one of the readiest and 
most amusing of talkers, returned one of General 
Grant's sallies with, "Anyhow, I know of a man 
whose life you took unknown to yourself." Then 
he told of a race he and Grant had outside of 
Galapa in 1846. "Don't you remember," he said, 
"that riding ahead of me you came upon a Mexican 
loaded with a lot of milk cans piled above his head 

[213] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and that you knocked him over as you swept by 
him?" 

"Yes," said Grant, "I believed if I stopped or 
questioned or even deflected it would lose me the 
race. I have not thought of it since. But now that 
you mention it I recall it distinctly." 

"Well," Williams continued, "you killed him. 
Your horse's hoof struck him. When, seeing I was 
beaten, I rode back, his head was split wide open. 
I did not tell you at the time because I knew it 
would cause you pain, and a dead greaser more or 
less made no difference." 

Later on General Grant took desk room in Vic- 
tor Newcomb's private office in New York. There 
I saw much of him, and we became good friends. 
He was the most interesting of men. Soldierlike — 
monosyllabic — in his official and business dealings 
he threw aside all formality and reserve in his social 
intercourse, delightfully reminiscential, indeed a 
capital story teller. I do not wonder that he had 
constant and disinterested friends who loved him 
sincerely. 

IV 

It has always been my opinion that if Chester A. 
Arthur had been named by the Republicans as their 
[214] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

candidate in 1884 they would have carried the elec- 
tion, spite of what ^Ir. Blaine, who defeated Arthur 
in the convention, had said and thought about the 
nomination of General Sherman. Arthur, like 
Grant, belonged to the category of lovable men in 
public life. 

There was a gallant captain in the army who had 
slapped his colonel in the face on parade. Morally, 
as man to man, he had the right of it. But military 
law is inexorable. The verdict was dismissal from 
the service. I went with the poor fellow's wife and 
her sister to see General Hancock at Governor's 
Island. It was a most affecting meeting — the gen- 
eral, tears rolling down his cheeks, taking them into 
his arms, and, when he could speak, saying: "I can 
do nothing but hold up the action of the court till 
Monday. Your recourse is the President and a 
pardon; I will recommend it, but" — putting his 
hand upon my shoulder — "here is the man to get the 
pardon if the President can be brought to see the 
case as most of us see it." 

At once I went over to Washington, taking 
Stephen French with me. When we entered the 
President's apartment in the White House he ad- 

[215] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

vanced smiling to greet us, saying: "I know what 
you boys are after; you mean " 

"Yes, Mr. President," I answered, "we do, and 
if ever " 

"I have thought over it, sworn over it, and prayed 
over it," he said, "and I am going to pardon him I" 



Another illustrative incident happened during 
the Arthur Administration. The dismissal of Gen. 
Fitz-John Porter from the army had been the sub- 
ject of more or less acrimonious controversy. Dur- 
ing nearly two decades this had raged in army 
circles. At length the friends of Porter, led by 
Curtin and Slocum, succeeded in passing a relief 
measure through Congress. They were in ecstasies. 
That there might be a presidential objection had 
not crossed their minds. 

Senator ^McDonald, of Indiana, a near friend of 
General Porter, and a man of rare worldly wisdom, 
knew better. Without consulting them he came to 
me. 

"You are personally close to the President," said 
he, "and you must know that if this bill gets to the 
White House he will veto it. With the Repubhcan 
[216] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

National Convention directly ahead he is hound to 
veto it. It must not be allowed to get to him ; and 
you are the man to stop it. They will listen to you 
and will not listen to me." 

First of all, I went to the White House. 

"Mr. President," I said, "I want you to authorize 
me to tell Curtin and Slocum not to send the Fitz- 
John Porter bill to you." 

"Why?" he answered. 

"Because," said I, "you will have to veto it; and, 
with the Frelinghuysens wild for it, as well as others 
of your nearest friends, I am sure you don't want 
to be obliged to do that. With your w^ord to me I 
can stop it, and have it for the present at least held 
up. 

His answer was, "Go ahead." 

Then I went to the Capitol. Curtin and Slocum 
were in a state of mind. It was hard to make them 
understand or believe what I told them. 

"Now, gentlemen," I continued, "I don't mean 
to argue the case. It is not debatable. I am just 
from the White House, and I am authorized by the 
President to say that if you send this bill to him he 

will veto it." 

[217] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

That, of course, settled it. They held it up. But 
after the presidential election it reached Arthur, 
and he did veto it. Not till Cleveland came in did 
Porter obtain his restoration. 

Curiously enough General Grant approved this. 
I had listened to the debate in the House — es- 
pecially the masterly speech of William Walter 
Phelps — without attaining a clear understanding of 
the many points at issue. I said as much to General 
Grant. 

"Why," he replied, "the case is as simple as A, 
B, C. Let me show you." 

Then, with a pencil he traced the Second Bull 
Run battlefield, the location of troops, both Federal 
and Confederate, and the exact passage in the ac- 
tion which had compromised General Porter. 

"If Porter had done what he was ordered to do," 
he went on, "Pope and his army would have been 
annihilated. In point of fact Porter saved Pope's 
Army." Then he paused and added: "I did not at 
the outset know this. I was for a time of a different 
opinion and on the other side. It was Longstreet's 
testimony — which had not been before the first 
Court of Inquiry that convicted Porter— which 
vindicated him and convinced me." 
[218] 



CHAPTER THE TENTH 

OF LIARS AND LYING WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND 

FEMINISM THE PROFESSIONAL FEMALE 

PARTIES, POLITICS AND POLITICIANS IN AMERICA 

ALL is fair in love and war, the saying hath it. 
"Lord!" cried the most dehghtful of hars, 
"How this world is given to lying." Yea, and how 
exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit. 

Just after the war of sections I was riding in a 
train with Samuel Bowles, who took a great interest 
in things Southern. He had been impressed by a 
newspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, 
as I had been its editor, put innumerable questions 
to me about it and its affairs. Among these he 
asked how great had been its circulation. Without 
explaining that often an entire company, in some 
cases an entire regiment, subscribed for a few 
copies, or a single copy, I answered : "I don't know 
precisely, but somewhere near a hundred thousand, 

[219] 



/ 



"MARSE HENRY" 

I take it." Then he said: "Where did you get 
your press power?" 

This was, of course, a poser, but it did not em- 
barrass me in the least. I was committed, and with- 
out a moment's thought I proceeded with an 
imaginary explanation which he afterward declared 
had been altogether satisfying. The story was too 
good to keep — maybe conscience pricked — and in a 
chummy talk later along I laughingly confessed. 

"You should tell that in your dinner speech to- 
night," he said. "If you tell it as you have just 
told it to me, it will make a hit," and I did. 

I give it as the opinion of a long life of experience 
and observation that the newspaper press, whatever 
its delinquencies, is not a common liar, but the most 
habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its 
editorial page I fear a little vapid and colorless. 
But there is a general and ever-present purpose to 
print the facts and give the public the opportunity 
to reach its own conclusions. 

There are liars and liars, lying and lying. It is, 
with a single exception, the most universal and 
venial of human frailties. We have at least three 
kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars — first, 
the common, ordinary, everyday liar, who lies with- 
[220] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

out rime or reason, rule or compass, aim, intent or 
interest, in whose mind the partition between truth 
and falsehood has fallen down ; then the sensational, 
imaginative liar, who has a tale to tell ; and, finally, 
the mean, malicious liar, who would injm-e his 
neighbor. 

This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is 
at its base amicable, because if nothing hinders it 
wants to please. All of us, however, are more or 
less its unconscious victims. 

Competition is not alone the life of trade; it is 
the life of life ; for each of us is in one way, or an- 
other, competitive. There is but one disinterested 
person in the world, the mother who whether of the 
human or animal kingdom, will die for her young. 
Yet, after all, hers, too, is a kind of selfishness. 

The woman is becoming over much a professional 
female. It is of importance that we begin to con- 
sider her as a new species, having enjoyed her 
beauty long enough. Is the world on the way to 
organic revolution? If I were a young man I should 
not care to be the lover of a professional female. 
As an old man I have affectionate relations with a 
number of suffragettes, as they dare not deny; that 
is to say, I long ago accepted woman suffrage as 

[221], 



"MARSE HENRY" 

inevitable, whether for good or evil, depending upon 

whether the woman's movement is going to stop 

with suffrage or run into feminism, changing the 

character of woman and her relations to men and 

with man. 

II 

I have never made party differences the occasion 
of personal quarrel or estrangement. On the con- 
trary, though I have been always called a Democrat, 
I have many near and dear friends among the Re- 
pubhcans. Politics is not war. Politics would not 
be war even if the politicians were consistent and 
honest. But there are among them so many 
changelings, cheats and rogues. 

Then, in politics as elsewhere, circumstances alter 
cases. I have as a rule thought very little of parties 
as parties, professional politicians and party lead- 
ers, and I think less of them as I grow older. The 
pohtician and the auctioneer might be described 
like the lunatic, the lover and the poet, as "of 
imagination all compact." One sees more mares' 
nests than would fill a book; the other pure gold in 
pinchbeck wares ; and both are out for gudgeons. 

It is the habit — nay, the business — of the party 
speaker when he mounts the raging stump to roar 
[222] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

his platitudes into the ears of those who have the 
siinphcity to listen, though neither edified nor en- 
lightened ; to aver that the horse he rides is sixteen 
feet high; that the candidate he supports is a giant; 
and that he himself is no small figure of a man. 

Thus he resembles the auctioneer. But it is the 
mock auctioneer whom he resembles; his stock in 
trade being largely, if not altogether, fraudulent. 
The success which at the outset of party welfare at- 
tended this legalized confidence game drew into it 
more and more players. For a long time they de- 
ceived themselves almost as much as the voters. 
They had not become professional. They were 
amateur. Many of them played for sheer love of 
the gamble. There were rules to regulate the play. 
But as time passed and voters multiplied, the pop- 
ular preoccupation increased the temptations and 
opportunities for gain, inviting the enterprising, 
the skillful and the corrupt to reconstitute patriot- 
ism into a commodity and to organize public opinion 
into a bill of lading. Thus politics as a trade, 
parties as trademarks, the politicians, like harlots, 
plying their vocation. 

'Now and again an able, honest and brave man, 
who aims at better things, appears. In the event 

[223] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

that fortune favors him and he attains high station, 
he finds himself surrounded and thwarted by men 
less able and courageous, who, however equal to 
discovering right from wrong, yet wear the party 
.collar, owe fealty to the party machine, are some- 
times actual slaves of the party boss. In the larger 
towns we hear of the City Hall ring; out in the 
counties of the Court House ring. We rarely any- 
where encounter clean, responsible administration 
and pure, disinterested, public service. 

The taxpayers are robbed before their eyes. The 
evil grows greater as we near the centers of popula- 
tion. But there is scarcely a village or hamlet 
where graft does not grow like weeds, the voters as 
gulhble and helpless as the infatuated victims of 
bunko tricks, ingeniously contrived by professional 
crooks to separate the fool and his money. Is self- 
government a failure? 

None of us would allow the votaries of the divine 
right of kings to tell us so, albeit we are ready 
enough to admit the imperfections of universal suf- 
frage, too often committing affairs of pith and 
moment, even of life and death, to the arbitrament 
of the mob, and costing more in cash outlay than 
royal establisliments. 
[224] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

The quadrennial period in American politics, 
set apart and dedicated to the election of presidents, 
magnifies these evil features in an otherwise ad- 
mirable system of government. That the whipper- 
snappers of the vicinage should indulge their pro- 
pensities comes as the order of their nature. But 
the party leaders are not far behind them. Each side 
construes every occurrence as an argument in its 
favor, assuring it certain victory. Take, for ex- 
ample, the latest state election anywhere. In point 
of fact, it foretold nothing. It threw no light upon 
coming events, not even upon current events. It 
leaves the future as hazy as before. Yet the man- 
agers of either party affect to be equally confident 
that it presages the triumph of their ticket in the 
next national election. The wonder is that so many 
of the voters will believe and be influenced by such 
transparent subterfuge. 

Is there any remedy for all this? I much fear 
that there is not. Government, like all else, is im- 
possible of perfection. It is as man is — good, bad 
and indifferent; which is but another way of say- 
ing we live in a world of cross purposes. We in 
America prefer republicanism. But would despot- 
ism be so demurrable under a wise unselfish despot? 

[225] 



it 



MARSE HENRY" 



III 



Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life 
and foreign history with our own one cannot help 
reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts of 
ancient and modern rehgion and government. I 
have wandered not a little over Europe at irregular 
intervals for more than fifty years. Always a de- 
votee to American institutions, I have been 
strengthened in my beliefs by what I have encoun- 
tered. 

The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch 
to belittle things American. The commercial spirit 
in the United States, which affects to be national- 
istic, is in reality cosmopoHtan. Money being its 
god, French money, English money, anything that 
calls itself money, is wealth to it. It has no time to 
waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put 
money in thy purse" has become its motto. Money 
constitutes the reason of its being. The organic law 
of the land is Greek to it, as are those laws of God 
which obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and 
gain to think, or to feel, on any abstract subject. 
That which does not appeal to it in the concrete is 
of no interest at all. 
[226] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, 
all things yielded to the theologian's misconception 
of the spiritual life so in these days of the Billion- 
aires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what 
they call the progress of the universe and the lead- 
ing of the times. Under their rule we have had 
extraordinary movement just as under the lords of 
the Palatinate and the Escurial — the medieval 
union of the devils of bigotry and power — Europe, 
which was but another name for Spain, had extraor- 
dinary movement. We know where it ended with 
Spain. Whither is it leading us? Ai-e we travel- 
ing the same road? 

Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once 
strolling along through the crypt of the Church of 
the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress the 
idea of a personal and physical resemblance be- 
tween the effigies in marble and bronze looking 
down upon me whichever way I turned, to some of 
our contemporary public men and seeming to say: 
"My love to the President when you see him next," 
and "Don't forget to remember me kindly, please, 
to the chairmen of both your national committees!" 



:[22T] 



(( 



MARSE HENRY" 



IV 



In a world of sin, disease and death — death 
inevitable — what may man do to drive out sin and 
cure disease, to the end that, barring accident, old 
age shall set the limit on mortal life? 

The quack doctor equally in ethics and in physics 
has played a leading part in human affairs. Only 
within a relatively brief period has science made 
serious progress toward discovery. Though Nature 
has perhaps an antidote for all her posions many of 
them continue to defy aj)proach. They lie con- 
cealed, leaving the astutest to grope in the dark. 

That which is true of material things is truer yet 
of spiritual things. The ideal about which we hear 
so much, is as unattained as the fabled bag of gold 
at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of 
perfectability anywhere one with itself. It speaks 
in diverse tongues. Its processes and objects are 
variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which 
lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracti- 
cable and the scheming of the self-seeking, breed- 
ing visionaries and pretenders. 

Easily assumed and asserted, too often it be- 
comes tyrannous, dealing with things outer and 
[228] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

visible while taking little if any account of the inner 
lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity 
and ignorance; makes fakers of some and fanatics 
of others; in politics where not an engine of op- 
pression, a corrupt influence ; in religion where not 
a zealot, a promoter of cant. In short the self- 
appointed apostle of uplift, who disregarding in- 
dividual character would make virtue a matter of 
statute law and ordain uniformity of conduct by 
act of conventicle or assembly, is likelier to produce 
moral chaos than to reach the sublime state he 
claims to seek. 

The bare suggestion is full of startling possi- 
bihties. Individualism was the discovery of the 
fathers of the American Republic. It is the bed- 
rock of our political philosophy. Human slavery 
was assuredly an indefensible institution. But the 
armed enforcement of freedom did not make a 
black man a white man. Nor will the wave of 
fanaticism seeking to control the food and drink 
and dress of the people make men better men. 
Danger lurks and is bound to come with the 
inevitable reaction. 

The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of 
the women. The leaders of feminism would abohsh 

[229] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

sex. To what end? The pessimist answers what 
easier than the demohtion of a sexless world gone 
entirely mad? How simple the engineries of de- 
struction. Civil war in America; universal hara- 
kiri in Europe ; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself 
in self-indulgence. Then a thousand years of total 
eclipse. Finally Macaulay's Australian surveying 
the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral from a broken 
parapet of London Bridge, and a Moslem con- 
queror of America looking from the hill of the 
Capitol at Washington upon the desolation of what 
was once the District of Columbia. Shall the end 
be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of 
Buddha, Mohammed and Confucius welded into a 
new religion describing itself as the last word of 
science, reason and common sense? 

Alas, and alack the day! In those places where 
the suffering rich most do congregate the words of 
Watts' hymn have constant application : 

For Satan finds some mischief still 
For idle hands to do. 

When they have not gone skylarking or grown 
tired of bridge they devote their leisure to organiz- 
ing clubs other than those of the uphft. There 
[230] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation 
of Bathing Suits at the seaside resorts to the 
League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled Cats. 
Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. 
That is what many of them are got up for. Do 
they advance the world in grace? One who sur- 
veys the scene can scarcely think so. 

But the whirl goes on ; the yachts sweep proudly 
out to sea; the auto cars dash madly through the 
streets; more and darker and deeper do the con- 
trasts of Hfe show themselves. How long shall it 
be when the mudsill millions take the upper ten 
thousand by the throat and rend them as the 
furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats 
of the Regime Ancien? The issue between capital 
and labor, for example, is full of generating heat 
and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the 
crowded centers of population, it may not one day 
engulf us all? 

Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries 
of an old man dropping back into second child- 
hood, who does not see that the world is wiser and 
better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, 
surely on the way to perfection? 

[231] 



"MARSE HENRY" 



One thing is certain : We are not standing still. 
Since "Adam delved and Eve span" — if they ever 
did — in the Garden of Eden, "somewhere in Asia," 
to the "goings on" in the Garden of the Gods di- 
rectly under Pike's Peak — the earth we inhabit has 
at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness — but 
surely it was never livelier than it now is; as the 
space-writer says, more "dramatic"; indeed, to 
quote the guidebooks, quite so "picturesque and 
interesting." 

Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come 
upon activities of one sort and another. Were 
Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened 
from his misanthrophy and Jacques, the forest 
cynic, stirred to something like enthusiasm. Is the 
world enduring the pangs of a second birth which 
shall recreate all things anew, supplementing the 
miracles of modern invention with a corresponding 
development of spiritual life ; or has it reached the 
top of the hill, and, mortal, like the human atoms 
that compose it, is it starting downward on the 
other side into an abyss which the historians of the 
future will once again call "the dark ages?" 
[232] 



''MARSE HENRY" 

We know not, and there is none to tell us. That 
which is actually happening were unbelievable if 
we did not see it, from hour to hour, from day to 
day. Horror succeeding horror has in some sort 
blunted our sensibilities. Not only are our sym- 
pathies numbed by the immensity of the slaughter 
and the sorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the 
selfish thought that, having thus far measurably es- 
caped, we may pull through without paying our 
share. This will account for a certain indifferent- 
ism we now and again encounter. 

At the moment we are felicitating ourselves — or, 
is it merely confusing ourselves? — over the revolu- 
tion in Russia. It seems of good augury. To be- 
gin with, for Russia. Then the murder war fairly 
won for tlie Allies, we are promised by the optimists 
a wise and lasting peace. 

The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Mos- 
cow sounded, we are told, the death knell of autoc- 
racy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones that 
echoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the 
ear of the masses muffled in the Schwarzwald and 
along the shores of the North Sea, and up and down 
the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whis- 
pered message which may presently break into 

[233] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

song; the glad song of freedom with it glorious re- 
frain: "The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having 
reached the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, all 
wm be well!" 

Anyhow, freedom ; self-government ; for whilst a 
scrutinizing and sohcitous pessimism, observing and 
considering many abuses, administrative and 
poHtical, federal and local, in our repubhcan system 
— abuses which being very visible are most lamenta- 
ble — may sometimes move us to lose heart of hope 
in democracy, we know of none better. So, let us 
stand by it ; pray for it ; fight for it. Let us by our 
example show the Russians how to attain it. Let 
us by the same token show the Germans how to 
attain it when they come to see, if they ever do, 
the havoc autocracy has made for Germany. That 
should constitute the bed rock of our politics and 
our religion. It is the true rehgion. Love of coun- 
try is love of God. Patriotism is rehgion. 

It is also Christianity. The pacifist, let me 
parenthetically observe, is scarcely a Christian. 
There be technical Christians and there be Chris- 
tians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the 
blurred letter of the law, which he misconstrues. The 
[234] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Christian, animated by its lioly spirit and led by its 
rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of 
heaven and hosts when he flies the flag of his coun- 
try and smites its enemies hip and thigh ! 



[235] 



CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH 

ANDREW JOHNSON — THE LIBERAL CONVENTION IN 

1872 CARL SCHURZ THE "QUADRILATERAL" — 

SAM BOWLES, HORACE WHITE AND MXJRAT HAL- 
STEAD — ^A QUEER COMPOSITE OF INCONGRUITIES 



AMONG the many misconceptions and mis- 
chances that befell the slavery agitation in 
the United States and finally led a kindred people 
into actual war the idea that got afloat after this 
war that every Confederate was a Secessionist best 
served the ends of the radicalism which sought to 
reduce the South to a conquered province, and as 
such to reconstruct it by hostile legislation sup- 
ported wherever needed by force. 

Andrew Johnson very well understood that a 
great majority of the men who were arrayed on 
the Southern side had taken the field against their 
better judgment through pressure of circumstance. 
They were Union men who had opposed secession 
[236] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and clung to the old order. Not merely in the Bor- 
der States did this class rule but in the Gulf States 
it held a respectable minority until the shot fired 
upon Sumter drew the call for troops from Lincoln. 
The Secession leaders, who had staked their all 
upon the hazard, knew that to save their move- 
ment from collapse it was necessary that blood be 
sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the 
message from Charleston: 

With cannon, mortar and petard 
We tender you our Beauregard 



with the response from Washington precipitating 
the conflict of theories into a combat of arms for 
which neither party was prepared. 

The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men 
had to choose between the North and the South, 
between their convictions and predilections on one 
side and expatriation on the other side — resistance 
to invasion, not secession, the issue. But four years 
later, when in 1865 all that they had believed and 
feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required 
no drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events 
more potent than acts of Congress had already 
reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this 

[237] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself 
a Southern man, understood it even better than 
Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincohi he 
proceeded not very skillfully to build upon it. 

The assassination of Lincoln, however, had 
played directly into the hands of the radicals, led 
by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens 
in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had 
fallen behind the marching van. The mad act of 
Booth put them upon their feet and brought them 
to the front. They were implacable men, politi- 
cians equally of resolution and ability. Events 
quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It 
was not alone Johnson's lack of temper and tact 
that gave them the whip hand. His removal from 
office would have opened the door of the White 
House to Wade, so that strategically Johnson's 
position was from the beginning beleaguered and 
came perilously near before the close to being un-^ 
tenable. 

Grant, a pohtical nondescript, not Wade, the un- 
compromising extremist, came after; and inevitably 
four years of Grant had again divided the triumph- 
ant Republicans. This was the situation during 
the winter of 1871-72, when the approaching Presi- 
[238] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

dential election brought the country face to face 
with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The 
South was in irons. The North was growing 
restive. Thinking people everywhere felt that con- 
ditions so anomalous to our institutions could not 
and should not endure. 

n 

Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry 
out the policies of Lincoln and had gone down in 
the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the 
ebb tide of its disastrous fortunes. 

It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of 
influential Republicans, dissatisfied for one cause 
and another with Grant, held a caucus and issued 
a call for what they described as a Liberal Republi- 
can Convention to assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 
1872. 

A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a 
Democrat by conviction and inheritance, I had 
been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for the 
acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage 
between the old and the new South I had placed 
upon the last three amendments to the Constitu- 
tion, naming them the Treaty of Peace between 

[239] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the Sections. The negro must be invested with the 
rights conferred upon him by these amendments, 
however mistaken and injudicious the South might 
think them. The obsolete Black Laws instituted 
during the slave regime must be removed from the 
statute books. The negro, like IMohammed's coffin, 
swung in midair. He was neither fish, flesh nor 
fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we 
must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make 
him, if possible, a contented and useful citizen. 
Failing of this, free government itself might be im- 
periled. 

I had behind me the intelligence of the Con- 
federate soldiers almost to a man. They at least 
were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war 
was over. But — and especially in Kentucky — 
there was an element that wanted to fight when it 
was too late; old Union Democrats and Union 
Whigs who clung to the hull of slavery when the 
kernel was gone, and proposed to win in politics 
what had been lost in battle. 

The leaders of this belated element were In com- 
plete control of the political machinery of the state. 
They regarded me as an impudent upstart — since 
I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee — as little 
[240] 




rroiii u Pilot ogruith ?<// -1/. B. Dradij 



AKHAIIASr LINCOLN IN 1801 



"MARSE HENRY'* 

better than a carpet-bagger; and had done their 
uttermost to put me down and drive me out. 

I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of bound- 
less optimism and my full share of self-confidence, 
no end of physical endurance and mental vitality, 
having some political as well as newspaper experi- 
ence. It never crossed my fancj^ that I could fail. 

I met resistance with aggression, answered at- 
tempts at bullying with scorn, generally irradiated 
by laughter. Yet w^as I not wholly bhnd to conse- 
quences and the admonitions of prudence ; and when 
the call for a Liberal Republican Convention ap- 
peared I realized that if I exj)ected to remain a 
Democrat in a Democratic community, and to in- 
fluence and lead a Democratic following, I must 
proceed warily. 

Though many of those proposing the new move- 
ment were famihar. acquaintances — some of them 
personal friends — the scheme was in the air, as it 
were. Its three newspaper bellwethers — Samuel 
Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead — were 
especially well known to me; so were Horace 
Greeley, Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley 
Matthew^s being my kinsman, George Hoadley and 
Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But they 

[241] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

were not the men I had trained with — not my 
"crowd" — and it was a question how far I might be 
able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political 
associates, to such company, even conceding that 
they proceeded under good fortune with a good 
plan, offering the South extrication from its woes 
and the Democratic Party an entering wedge into 
a solid and hitherto irresistible North. 

Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance 
to Cincinnati, to have a look at the stalking horse 
there to be displayed, free to take it or leave it as I 
liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite 
open and intact. 

m 

A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum 
was never assembled. They had already begun to 
straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired 
and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, 
spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from 
New York — mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as 
it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from 
Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who 
had come as Greeley's personal representative, had 
his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. 
[242] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

There were a few rather overdressed persons from 
New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, 
and a motely array of Southerners of every sort, 
who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised 
rehef to intolerable conditions. The full contingent 
of Washington correspondents was there, of course, 
with sharpened eyes and pens to make the most 
of what they had already begun to christen a con- 
clave of cranks. 

Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and 
we drove to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where Schurz 
and White were awaiting us. Then and there was 
organized a fellowship which in the succeeding 
campaign cut a considerable figure and went by 
the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to 
limit the Presidential nominations of the convention 
to Charles Francis Adams, Bowles' candidate, and 
Lyman Trumbull, White's candidate, omitting al- 
together, because of specific reasons urged by 
White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who be- 
cause of his Kentucky connections had better suited 
my purpose. 

The very next day the secret was abroad, and 
Whitelaw Reid came to me to ask why in a news- 

[243] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

paper combine of this sort the New York Tribune 
had been left out. 

To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had 
been or should be, and I stated as much to my new 
colleagues. They offered objection which to me 
appeared perverse if not childish. They did not 
like Reid, to begin with. He was not a principal 
like the rest of us, but a subordinate. Greeley 
was this, that and the other. He could never be 
relied upon in any coherent practical plan of cam- 
paign. To talk about him as a candidate was 
ridiculous. 

I listened rather impatiently and finally I said: 
"Now, gentlemen, in this movement we shall need 
the New York Tribune. If we admit Reid we 
clinch it. You will all agree that Greeley has no 
chance of a nomination, and so by taking him in 
we both eat our cake and have it." 

On this view of the case Reid was invited to join 
us, and that very night he sat with us at the St. 
Nicholas, where from night to night until the end 
we convened and went over the performances and 
developments of the day and concerted plans for 
the morrow. 
[244] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

As I recall these s^nnposiums some amusing and 
some plaintive memories rise before me. 

The first serious business that engaged us was the 
killing of the boom for Judge David Davis, of the 
Supreme Court, which was assuming definite and 
formidable proportions. The preceding winter it 
had been incubating at Washington under the 
ministration of some of the most astute politicians 
of the time, mainly, however. Democratic members 
of Congress. 

A party of these had brought it to Cincinnati, 
opening headquarters well provided with the 
requisite commissaries. Every delegate who came 
in that could be reached was laid hold of and con- 
ducted to Davis' headquarters. 

We considered it flat burglary. It was a gross 
infringement upon our copyrights. What business 
had the professional politicians with a great reform 
movement? The influence and dignity of journal- 
ism were at stake. The press was imperilled. We, 
its custodians, could brook no such deflection, not 
to say defiance, from intermeddling office seekers, 
especially from broken-down Democratic office 
seekers. 

The inner sanctuary of our proceedings was a 

[245] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

common drawing-room between two bedchambers, 
occupied by Schurz and myself. Here we repaired 
after supper to smoke the pipe of fraternity and 
reform, and to save the country. What might be 
done to kill off "D. Davis," as we irreverently called 
the eminent and learned jurist, the friend of Lin- 
coln and the only aspirant having a "bar'l"? That 
was the question. We addressed ourselves to the 
task with earnest purpose, but characteristically. 
The power of the press must be invoked. It was 
our chief if not our only weapon. Seated at the 
same table each of us indited a leading editorial for 
his paper, to be wired to its destination and printed 
next morning, striking D. Davis at a prearranged 
and varying angle. Copies of these were made for 
Halstead, who having with the rest of us read and 
compared the different scrolls indited one of his 
own in general commentation and review for Cin- 
cinnati consumption. In next day's Commercial, 
blazing under vivid headlines, these leading edito- 
rials, dated "Chicago" and "New York," "Spring- 
field, Mass.," and "Louisville, Ky.," appeared with 
the explaining line "The Tribune of to-morrow 

morning will say " "The Courier- Journal" — 

[246] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and the Republican — will say to-morrow morn- 



»> 



mg- 

Wondrous consensus of public opinion! The 
Davis boom went down before it. The Davis boom- 
ers were paralyzed. The earth seemed to have 
risen and hit them midships. The incoming dele- 
gates were arrested and forewarned. Six months 
of adroit scheming was set at naught, and little 
more was heard of "D. Davis." 

We were, like the Mousquetaires, equally in for 
fighting and foot-racing, the point with us being to 
get there, no matter how; the end — the defeat of 
the rascally machine politicians and the reform of 
the public service — justifying the means. I am 
writing this nearly fifty years after the event and 
must be forgiven the fiing of my -wisdom at my own 
expense and that of my associates in harmless 
crime. 

Some ten years ago I wrote: "Reid and White 
and I the sole survivors ; Reid a great Ambassador, 
White and I the virtuous ones, still able to sit up 
and take notice, with three meals a day for which 
we are thankful and able to pay; no one of us 
recalcitrant. We were wholly serious — maybe a 
trifle visionary, but as upright and patriotic in our 

[247] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

intentions and as loyal to our engagements as it 
was possible for older and maybe better men to be. 
For my part I must say that if I have never any- 
thing on my conscience worse than the massacre of 
that not very edifying yet promising combine I 
shall be troubled by no remorse, but to the end shall 
sleep soundly and well." 

Alas, I am not the sole survivor. In this con- 
nection an amusing incident throwing some light 
upon the period thrusts itself upon my memory. 
The Quadrilateral, including Reid, had just fin- 
ished its consolidation of public opinion before re- 
lated, when the cards of Judge Craddock, chair- 
man of the Kentucky Democratic Committee, and 
of Col. Stoddard Johnston, editor of the Frank- 
fort Yeoman, the organ of the Kentucky Democ- 
racy, were brought from below. They had come 
to look after me — that was evident. By no chance 
could they find me in more equivocal company. 
In addition to. ourselves — bad enough, from the 
Kentucky point of view — Theodore Tilton, Donn 
Piatt and David A. Wells were in the room. 

When the Kentuckians crossed the threshold and 
were presented seriatim the face of each was a 
study. Even a proper and immediate applica- 
[248] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

tion of whisky and water did not suffice to restore 
their lost equilibrium and bring them to their usual 
state of convivial self-possession. Colonel John- 
ston told me years after that when they went away 
they walked in silence a block or two, when the old 
judge, a model of the learned and sedate school of 
Kentucky politicians and jurists, turned to him and 
said: "It is no use, Stoddart, we cannot keep up 
with that young man or with these times. 'Lord, 
now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace 1' '* 

IV 

The Jupiter Tonans of reform in attendance 
upon the convention was Col. Alexander K. Mc- 
Clure. He was one of the handsomest and most 
imposing of men; Halstead himself scarcely more 
so. McClure was personally unknown to the 
Quadrilateral. But this did not stand in the way 
of our asking him to dine with us as soon as his 
claims to fellowship in the good cause of reform be- 
gan to make themselves apparent through the need 
of bringing the Pennsylvania delegation to a 
realizing sense. 

He looked like a god as he entered the room; 
nay, he acted like one. Schurz first took him in 

[249] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

hand. With a lofty courtesy I have never seen 
equalled he tossed his inquisitor into the air. Hal- 
stead came next, and tried him upon another tack. 
He fared no better than Schurz. And hurrying to 
the rescue of my friends, McClure, looking now a 
bit bored and resentful, landed me somewhere near 
the ceiling. 

It would have been laughable if it had not been 
ignominious. I took my discomfiture with the bad 
grace of silence throughout the stiff, formal and 
brief meal which was then announced. But when 
it was over and the party, risen from table, was 
about to disperse I collected my energies and re- 
sources for a final stroke. I was not willing to re- 
main so crushed nor to confess myself so beaten, 
though I could not disguise from myself a feeling 
that all of us had been overmatched. 

"McClure," said I with the cool and quiet resolu- 
tion of despair, drawing him aside, "what in the 
do you want anyhow?" 

He looked at me with swift intelligence and a 
sudden show of sympathy, and then over at the 
others with a withering glance. 

"What? With those cranks? Nothing." 

Jupiter descended to earth. I am afraid we 
[250] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

actually took a glass of wine together. Anyhow, 
from that moment to the hour of his death we were 
the best of friends. 

Without the inner circle of the Quadrilateral, 
which had taken matters into their own hands, were 
a number of persons, some of them disinterested and 
others simple curiosity and excitement seekers, who 
might be described as merely lookers-on in Vienna. 
The Sunday afternoon before the convention was 
to meet we, the self -elect, fell in with a party of 
these in a garden "over the Rhine," as the German 
quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was first 
general and rather aimless talk. Then came a great 
deal of speech making. Schurz started it with a 
few pungent observations intended to suggest and 
inspire some common ground of opinion and sen- 
timent. Nobody was inclined to dispute his lead- 
ership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. 
It turned out that each regarded himself and 
wished to be regarded as a man with a mission, hav- 
ing a clear idea how things were not to be done. 
There were Civil Service Reform Protectionists 
and Civil Service Reform Free Traders. There 
were a few politicians, who were discovered to be 

[251] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

spoilsmen, the unforgivable sin, and quickly dis- 
missed as such. 

Coherence was the missing ingredient. Not a 
man jack of them was willing to commit or bind 
himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one 
way and William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite 
way. David A. Wells sought to get the two to- 
gether; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his 
head in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw 
in a chunk or so of a rather agitating newspaper in- 
dependency, and Halstead was in an inflamed state 
of jocosity to the more serious-minded. 

It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents 
' — story writers and satirists who were there to make 
the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was 
much in excess of the conventional — with George 
Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt to set the pace. 
Hyde had come from St. Louis to keep especial 
tab on Grosvenor. Though rival editors facing our 
way, they had not been admitted to the Quad- 
rilateral. McCullagh and Nixon arrived with the 
earliest from Chicago. The lesser lights of the 
guild were innumerable. One might have mistaken 
it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press. 

[252] 



'MARSE HENRY" 



y 



The convention assembled. It was in Cincinnati's 
great Music Hall. Schurz presided. Who that 
was there will ever forget his opening words: 
"This is moving day." He was just turned forty- 
two; in his physiognomy a scholarly Hen' Doktor; 
in his trim lithe figure a graceful athlete; in the 
tones of his voice an orator. 

Even the bespectacled doctrinaires of the East, 
w^hence, since the days when the Star of Bethlehem 
shone over the desert, wisdom and wise men have 
had their emanation, were moved to something like 
enthusiasm. The rest of us were fer\dd and aglow. 
Two days and a night and a half the Quadri- 
lateral had the world in a sling and things its own 
way. It had been agreed, as I have said, to limit 
the field to Adams, Trumbull and Greeley ; Greeley 
being out of it, as having no chance, still further 
abridged it to Adams and Trumbull; and, Trum- 
bull not developing very strong, Bowles, Halstead 
and I, even White, began to be sure of Adams on 
the first ballot; Adams the indifferent, who had 
sailed away for Europe, observing that he was not 

[253] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

a candidate for the nomination and otherwise inti- 
mating his disdain of us and it. 

Matters thus apparently cocked and primed, the 
convention adjourned over the first night of its 
session with everybody happy except the D. Davis 
contingent, which lingered on the scene, but knew 
its "cake was dough." If we had forced a vote 
that night, as we might have done, we should have 
nominated Adams. But inspired by the bravery 
of youth and inexperience we let the golden oppor- 
tunity slip. The throng of delegates and the audi- 
ence dispersed. 

In those days, it being the business of my life to 
turn day into night and night into day, it was not 
my habit to seek my bed much before the presses 
began to thunder below, and this night proving no 
exception, and being tempted by a party of Ken- 
tuckians, who had come, some to back me and some 
to watch me, I did not quit their agreeable society 
until the "wee short hours ayont the twal." Be- 
fore turning in I glanced at the early edition of 
the Commercial, to see that something — I was too 
tired to decipher precisely what — had happened. It 
was, in point of fact, the arrival about midnight of 
[254] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Gen. Frank P. Blair and Governor B. Gratz 
Brown. 

I had in my possession documents that would 
have induced at least one of them to pause before 
making himself too conspicuous. The Quadri- 
lateral, excepting Reid, knew this. We had sepa- 
rated upon the adjournment of the convention. I 
being across the river in Covington, their search 
was unavailing. I was not to be found. They were 
in despair. When having had a few hours of rest I 
reached the convention hall toward noon it was too 
late. 

I got into the thick of it in time to see the close, 
not without an angry collision with that one of the 
newly arrived actors whose coming had changed 
the course of events, with whom I had lifelong rela- 
tions of affectionate intimacy. Saihng but the 
other day through JMediterranean waters with 
Joseph Pulitzer, who, then a mere youth, was yet 
the secretary of the convention, he recalled the 
scene; the unexpected and not overattractive ap- 
pearance of the governor of Missouri ; his not very 
pleasing yet ingenious speech; the stoical, almost 
lethargic indifference of Schurz. 

"Carl Schurz," said Pulitzer, "was the most in- 

[255] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

dustrious and the least energetic man I have ever 
worked with. A word from him at that crisis would 
have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. 
It was simply not in him to speak it." 

Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of en- 
thusiasm, his workers, with Whitelaw Reid at their 
head, having maintained an admirable and effective 
organization and being thoroughly prepared to take 
advantage of the opportune moment. It was the 
logic of the event that B. Gratz Brown should be 
placed on the ticket with him. 

The Quadrilateral was nowhere. It was done 
for. The impossible had come to pass. There rose 
thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between 
Schurz and myself, which illustrates our state of 
mind. My version is that we left the convention 
hall together with an immaterial train of after in- 
cidents, his that we had not met after the adjourn- 
ment — he quite sure of this because he had looked 
for me in vain. 

"Schurz was right," said Joseph Pulitzer upon 
the occasion of our yachting cruise just mentioned, 
*'I know, for he and I went directly from the hall 
with Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, 
where we dined and passed the afternoon." 
[256] 






--V 



f 



I 



i 



tF ^ "^ 



ii V 



% 



t ^ 




^•^ ' '* s^ 





i''/'o«(. fl Photograph by M. B. Brady 



3rRS. LIXCOLN IX 1861 



"MARSE HENRY" 

The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a 
cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was the only one of us 
who clearly understood the situation and thorough- 
ly knew what he was about. He came to me and 
said: "I have won, and you people have lost. I 
shall expect that you stand by the agreement and 
meet me as my guests at dinner to-night. But if 
you do not personally look after this the others will 
not be there." 

I was as badly hurt as any, but a bond is a bond 
and I did as he desired, succeeding partly bj^ coax- 
ing and partly by insisting, though it was devious 
work. 

Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to 
than Reid's dinner. Horace White looked more 
than ever like an iceberg, Sam Bowles was diplo- 
matic but ineffusive, Schurz was as a death's head 
at the board ; Halstead and I through sheer bravado 
tried to enliven the feast. But they would none 
of us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly, re- 
formers hoist by their own petard. 

VI 

The reception bj^ the country of the nomination 
of Horace .Greeley was as inexplicable to the poli- 

[257] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

ticians as the nomination itself had been un- 
expected by the Quadrilateral. The peoj)le rose to 
it. The sentimental, the fantastic and the para- 
doxical in human nature had to do with this. At 
the South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into 
positive enthusiasm. Peace was the need if not the 
longing of the Southern heart, and Greeley's had 
been the first hand stretched out to the South from 
the enemy's camp — very bravely, too, for he had 
signed the bail bond of Jefferson Davis — and quick 
upon the news flashed the response from generous 
men eager for the chance to pay something upon a 
recognized debt of gratitude. 

Except for this spontaneous uprising, which 
continued unabated in July, the Democratic Party 
could not have been induced at Baltimore to ratify 
the proceedings at Cincinnati and formally to make 
Greeley its candidate. The leaders dared not resist 
it. Some of them halted, a few held out, but by 
midsurmner the great body of them came to the 
front to head the procession. 

He was a queer old man ; a very medley of con- 
tradictions ; shrewd and simple ; credulous and pene- 
trating; a master penman of the school of Swift and 
Cobbett; even in his odd picturesque personality 
[258] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

whimsically attractive ; a man to be reckoned with 
where he chose to put his powers forth, as Seward 
learned to his cost. 

What he w^ould have done with the Presidency- 
had he reached it is not easy to say or surmise. He 
was altogether unsuited for official life, for which 
nevertheless he had a passion. But he was not so 
readil}' deceived in men or misled in measures as he 
seemed and as most people thought him. 

His convictions w^ere emotional, his philosophy 
was experimental; but there was a certain method 
in their application to public affairs. He gave 
bountifully of his affection and his confidence to 
the few who enjoyed his familiar friendship — ac- 
cessible and S5nnpathetic though not indiscriminat- 
ing to those who appealed to his impressionable 
sensibilities and sought his help. He had been a 
good party man and was by nature and tempera- 
ment a partisan. 

To him place was not a badge of servitude ; it was 
a decoration — preferment, promotion, popular 
recognition. He had always yearned for office as 
the legitimate destination of pubhc life and the 
honorable award of party service. During the 
greater part of his career the conditions of jour- 

[259] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

nalism had been rather squalid and servile. He 
was really great as a journalist. He was truly and 
highly fit for nothing else, but seeing less deserving 
and less capable men about him advanced from one 
post of distinction to another he wondered why his 
turn proved so tardy in coming, and when it would 
come. It did come with a rush. What more natural 
than that he should believe it real instead of the 
empty pageant of a vision? 

It had taken me but a day and a night to pull 
myself together after the first shock and surprise 
and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the water- 
logged factions ashore. This was clearly indis- 
pensable to forcing the Democratic organization to 
come to the rescue of what would have been other- 
wise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was 
deeply disgruntled. Before he could be appeased 
a bridge, found in what was called the Fifth Avenue 
Hotel Conference, had to be constructed in order to 
carry him across the stream which flowed between 
his disappointed hopes and aims and what appeared 
to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. He 
had taken to his tent and sulked like another 
Achilles. He was harder to deal with than any of 
[2^0] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the Democratic file leaders, but he finally yielded 
and did splendid work in the campaign. 

His was a stubborn spirit not readily adjustable. 
He was a noblj^ gifted man, but from first to last an 
alien in an alien land. He once said to me, "If I 
should live a thousand years they would still call 
me a Dutchman." No man of his time spoke so 
well or wrote to better purpose. He was equally 
skillful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and 
Morton, whom — especially in the French arms mat- 
ter — he completely dominated and outshone. As 
sincere and unselfish, as patriotic and as courageous 
as any of his contemporaries, he could never attain 
the full measure of the popular heart and confi- 
dence, albeit reaching its understanding directly 
and surely; within himself a man of sentiment who 
was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew 
this and felt it. 

The Nast cartoons, which as to Greeley and 
Sumner were unsparing in the last degi-ee, whilst 
treating Schurz with a kind of considerate quahfy- 
ing humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I 
do not think Greeley minded them much if at all. 
They were very effective; notably the "Pirate 
Ship," which represented Greeley leaning over the 

[261] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

taffrail of a vessel carrying the Stars and Stripes 
and waving his . handkerchief at the man-of-war 
Uncle Sam in the distance, the political leaders of 
the Confederacy dressed in true corsair costume 
crouched below ready to spring, Nothing did more 
to sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the North- 
ern heart, and to lash the fury of the rank and file 

of those who were urged to vote as they had shot 
and who had hoisted above them the Bloody Shirt 
for a bamier. The first half of the canvass the 
bulge was with Greeley; the second half began in 
eclipse, to end in something very like collapse. 

The old man seized his flag and set out upon his 
own account for a tour of the country. Right well 
he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any 
good toward the shaping of results Greeley's 
speeches surely should have elected him. They were 
marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and 
touching appeals to the better sense and the 
magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for gen- 
erous impressions; convincing in their simplicity 
and integrity; unanswerable from any standpoint 
of sagacious statesmanship or true patriotism if the 
North had been in any mood to listen and to reason, 

I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to 
[262] 



"MARSE HENKY" 

Louisville and thence to Indianapolis, where others 
were waiting to take him in charge. He was in a 
state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and 
noisy audiences which we faced he stood apparently 
pleased and composed, delivering his words as he 
might have dictated them to a stenographer. As 
soon as we were alone he would break out into a 
kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional 
bursts of objurgation. He especially distrusted the 
Quadrilateral, making an exception in my case, as 
well he might, because however his nomination had 
jarred my judgment I had a real affection for him, 
dating back to the years immediately preceding the 
war when I was wont to encounter him in the re- 
porters' galleries at Washington, which he pre- 
ferred to using his floor privilege as an ex-member 
of Congress. 

It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine ; 
Indiana and Ohio had voted. He was for the first 
time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. 
The South in irons and under military rule and 
martial law sure for Grant, there had never been 
any real chance. Now it was obvious that there 
was to be no compensating ground swell at the 
North. That he should pour forth his chagrin to 

[263] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

one whom he knew so well and even regarded as 
one of his boys was inevitable. Much of what he 
said was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was 
mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to 
the main point that defeat stared us in the face. 
I was glad and yet loath to part with him. If ever 
a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to 
lean upon he did during those dark days — the end 
in darkest night nearer than anyone could divine. 
He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed 
him; bore a manlier part than was commonly as- 
cribed to tile slovenly slipshod habiliments and the 
aspects in which benignancy and vacillation seemed 
to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad the ele- 
ments conspired against him. At home his wife 
lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray 
head he still carried hke a hero, but the worn and 
tender heart was beginning to break. Overwhelm- 
ing defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. 
He never quitted his dear one's beside until the 
last pulsebeat, and then he sank beneath the load 
of grief. 

"The Tribune is gone and I am gone," he said, 
and spoke no more. 

The death of Greeley fell upon the country with 
[264] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

a sudden shock. It roused a universal sense of pity 
and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In 
an instant the bitterness of the campaign was for- 
gotten, though the huzzas of the victors still rent 
the air. The President, his late antagonist, with his 
cabinet and the leading members of the two Houses 
of Congress, attended his funeral. As he lay in his 
coffin he was no longer the arch rebel, leading a com- 
bine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Re- 
publican orators and newspapers had depicted 
him, but the brave old apostle of freedom who had 
done more than all others to make the issues upon 
which a militant and triumphant party had risen 
to power. 

The multitude remembered only the old white 
hat and the sweet old baby face beneath it, heart 
of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the in- 
carnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast de- 
votion to his duty as he saw it, and to the needs of 
the whole human family. A tragedy in truth it was ; 
and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there 
rose above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of match- 
less beauty — the flower of peace and love between 
the sections of the Union to which his life had been 
a sacrifice. 

[265] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

The crank convention had builded wiser than it 
knew. That the Democratic Party could ever have 
been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for 
President of the United States reads even now like 
a page out of a nonsense book. That his warmest 
support should have come from the South seems 
incredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom 
shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his 
coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of 
Charles Francis Adams or of LjTiian Trumbull 
meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of 
the problem and as certain defeat at the end of it. 
His candidacjr threw a flood of light and warmth 
into the arena of deadly strife ; it made a more equal 
and reasonable division of parties possible; it put 
the Southern half of the country in a position to 
plead its own case by showing the Northern half 
that it was not wholly recalcitrant or reactionary; 
and it made way for real issues of pith and moment 
relating to the time instead of pigments of bellicose 
passion and scraps of ante-bellum controversy. 

In a word Greeley did more by his death to com- 
plete the work of Lincoln than he could have done 
by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White 
House he so much desired. Though but sixty-one 
[266] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

years of age, his race was rim. Of him it may be 
truly written that he hved a hfe full of inspiration 
to his countrymen and died not in vain, "our later 
Franklin" fittingly inscribed upon his tomb. 



[267] 



CHAPTER THE TWELFTH 

THE IDEAL IN PUBLIC LIFE — POLITICIANS^ STATES- 
MEN AND PHILOSOPHERS THE DISPUTED PRESI- 
DENCY IN 1876-7 THE PERSONALITY AND 

CHARACTER OF MR. TILDEN HIS ELECTION AND 

EXCLUSION BY A PARTISAN TRIBUNAL 



THE soul of journalism is disinterestedness. 
But neither as a principle nor an asset had 
this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most 
of my younger life I was accused of ulterior motives 
of political ambition, whereas I had seen too much 
of preferment not to abhor it. To me, as to my 
father, office has seemed ever a badge of servitude. 
For a long time, indeed, I nursed the delusions of 
the ideal. The love of the ideal has not in my old 
age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim 
of it so much abused that when a public man calls 
it for a witness I begin to suspect his sincerity. 
A virile old friend of mine — who lived in Texas, 

[268] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

though he went there from Rhode Island — used to 
declare with sententious emphasis that war is the 
state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, ad- 
dressing me as if I were personally accountable, 
"you are emasculating the human species. You 
are changing men into women and women into men. 
You are teaching everybody to read, nobody to 
think; and do you know where you will end, sir? 
Extermination, sir — extermination I On the north 
side of the North Pole there is another world 
peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the 
very least ; every giant of them a hundred feet high. 
Now about the time you have reduced your uni- 
verse to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick- 
axe will break through the thin partition — the mere 
ice curtain — separating these giants from us, and 
then they will sweep through and swoop down and 

swallow you, sir, and the likes of you, with your 
topsy-turvy civilization, your boasted literature and 
science and art!" 

This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for suc- 
cess in public life. "Whenever you get up to make 
a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming yourself 
the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and 
end by intimating that you are the bravest;" and 

[269] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

then with the charming inconsistency of the dreamer 
he would add: "If there be anything on this earth 
that I despise it is bluster." 

Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson. Yet he, too, in his way was an idealist, 
and for all his oddity a man of intellectual integrity, 
a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and 
illustrations, but true to his convictions of right 
and duty, as Emerson would have had him be. For 
was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk 
on our own feet ; we will work with our own hands ; 
we will speak our own minds?" 

II 

In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented 
Theodore I have quite made up my mind that there 
is no such thing as the ideal in public life, constru- 
ing public life to refer to pohtical transactions. 
The ideal may exist in art and letters, and some- 
times very young men imagine that it exists in very 
young women. But here we must draw the line. 
As society is constituted the ideal has no place, not 
even standing room, in the arena of civics. 

If we would make a place for it we must begin 
by realizing this. The painter, like the lover, is a 
[270] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

law unto himself, with his little picture — the poet, 
also, with his little rhyme — his atelier his universe, 
his attic his field of battle, his weapons the uten- 
sils of his craft — he himself his own Providence. 
It is not so in the world of action, where the condi- 
tions are directly reversed; where the one player 
contends against many players, seen and unseen; 
where each move is met by some counter-move; 
where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or 
rudely blotted out by a mysterious hand stretched 
forth from the darkness. 

"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said 
Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulay is of everything." 
Melbourne was a man of affairs, JMacaulay a man 
of books; and so throughout the story the men of 
action have been fatalists, from Casar to Napoleon 
and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible 
player behind the screen. 

Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is 
government. In spite of the essays of Bentham 
and IVIill the science of government has yet to be 
discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in 
the ideal state, which has never existed. 

The politician, like the poor, we have always with 
us. As long as men delegate to other men the 

[271] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

function of acting for them, of thinking for them, 
we shall continue to have him. 

He is a variable quantity. In the crowded cen- 
ters his distinguishing marks are short hair and 
cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the six- 
shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Ken- 
tucky and Texas, a fighter and an orator. But 
the statesman — the ideal statesman — in the mind's 
eye, Horatio ! Bound by practical limitations such 
an anomaly would be a statesman minus a party, a 
statesman who never gets any votes or anywhere 
— a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have 
had some imitation ideal statesmen who have been 
more or less successful in palming off their pinch- 
beck wares for the real ; but looking backward over 
the history of the country we shall find the greatest 
among our public men — measuring greatness by 
real and useful service — to have been while they 
lived least regarded as idealists; for they were 
men of flesh and blood, who amid the rush of 
events and the calls to duty could not stop to paint 
pictures, to consider sensibilities, to put forth the 
deft hand where life and death hung upon the 
stroke of a bludgeon or the swinging of a club. 

Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor 
[272] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor Lincoln, though each 
of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. 
They loved truth for truth's sake, even as they 
loved their country. Yet no one of them ever quite 
attained his conception of it. 

Truth indeed is ideal. But when we come to 
adapt and apply it, how many faces it shows us, 
what varying aspects, so that he is fortunate who 
is able to catch and hold a single fleeting expres- 
sion. To bridle this and saddle it, and, as we say 
in Kentucky, to ride it a turn or two around the 
paddock or, still better, down the home-stretch of 
things accomplished, is another matter. The real 
statesman must often do as he can, not as he would ; 
the ideal statesman existing only in the credulity 
of those simple souls w^ho are captivated by appear- 
ances or deceived by professions. 

The nearest approach to the ideal statesman I 
have known was most grossly stigmatized while he 
lived. I have INIr. Tilden in mind. If ever man 
pursued an ideal life he did. From youth to age 
he dwelt amid his fancies. He was truly a man of 
the world among men of letters and a man of let- 
ters among men of the world. A philosopher pure 
and simple — a lover of books, of pictures, of all 

[273] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

things beautiful and elevating — he yet attained 
great riches, and being a doctrinaire and having a 
passion for affairs lie was able to gratify the as- 
pirations to eminence and the yearning to be of 
service to the State which had filled his heart. 

He seemed a medley of contradiction. Without 
the artifices usual to the practical politician he grad- 
ually rose to be a power in his party ; thence to be- 
come the leader of a vast following, his name a 
shibboleth to millions of his countrymen, who en- 
thusiastically supported him and who beheved that 
he was elected Chief Magistrate of the United 
States. He was an idealist; he lost the White 
House because he was so, though represented while 
he lived by his enemies as a scheming spider weav- 
ing his web amid the coil of mystification in which 
he hid himself. For he was i^ersonally known to 
few in the city where he had made his abode; a 
great lawyer and jurist who rarely appeared in 
court ; a great political leader to whom the hustings 
were mainly a stranger; a thinker, and yet a 
dreamer, who lived his own life a little apart, as a 
poet might; uncorrupting and incorruptible; least 
of all were his poHtical companions moved by the 
loss of the presidency, which had seemed in his 

[274] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

grasp. And finally he died — though a master of 
legal lore — to have his last will and testament suc- 
cessfully assailed. 

Except as news venders the newspapers — espe- 
cially newspaper workers — should give politics a 
wide berth. Certainly they should have no party 
pohtics. True to say, journalism and literature 
and politics are as wide apart as the poles. From 
Bolingbroke, the most splendid of the world's fail- 
ures, to Thackeray, one of its greatest masters of 
letters — who happily did not get the chance he 
sought in parliamentary life to fall — both English 
history and American history are full of illustra- 
tions to this effect. Except in the comic opera of 
French politics the poet, the artist, invested with 
power, seems to lose his efficiency in the ratio of his 
genius ; the literary gift, instead of aiding, actually 
antagonizing the aptitude for public business. 

The statesman may not be fastidious. The poet, 
the artist, must be always so. If the party leader 
preserve his integrity — if he keep himself disinter- 
ested and clean — if his public influence be inspiring 
to his countrymen and his private influence ob- 
structive of cheats and rogues among his adherents 
— he will have done well. 

[275] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

We have left behind us the gibbet and the stake. 
No further need of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus and 
the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft and 
priestcraft. We have done something more than 
mark time. We report progress. Yet despite the 
miracles of modern invention how far in the arts of 
government has the world traveled from darkness 
to light since the old tribal days, and what has it 
learned except to enlarge the area, to amplify and 
augment the agencies, to multiply and complicate 
the forms and processes of corruption? By cor- 
ruption I mean the dishonest advantage of the few 
over the many. 

The dreams of yesterday, we are told, become the 
realities of to-morrow. In these despites I am an 
optimist. Much truly there needs still to be learned, 
much to be unlearned. Advanced as we consider 
ourselves we are yet a long way from the most rudi- 
mentary perception of the civilization we are so fond 
of parading. The eternal verities — where shall we 
seek them? Little in religious affairs, less still in 
commercial affairs, hardly any at all in political af- 
fairs, that being right which represents each organ- 
ism. Still we progress. The pulpit begins to turn 
from the sinister visage of theology and to teach 
[276] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the simple lessons of Christ and Him crucified. The 
press, which used to be omniscient, is now only in- 
discriminate — a clear gain, emitting by force of 
publicity, if not of shine, a kind of light through 
whose diverse rays and foggy luster we may now 
and then get a glimpse of truth. 

Ill 

The time is coming, if it has not already arrived, 
when among fair-minded and intelligent Americans 
there will not be two opinions touching the Hayes- 
Tilden contest for the presidency in 1876-77 — that 
both by the popular vote and a fair count of the 
electoral vote Tilden was elcted and Hayes was de- 
feated; but the whole truth underlying the deter- 
minate incidents which led to the rejection of Til- 
den and the seating of Hayes will never be known. 

"All history is a lie," observed Sir Robert Wal- 
pole, the corruptionist, mindful of what was likely 
to be written about himself; and "What is history," 
asked Napoleon, the conqueror, "but a fable agreed 
upon?" 

In the first administration of Mr. Cleveland 
there were present at a dinner table in Washing- 
ton, the President being of the party, two leading 

[277] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Democrats and two leading Republicans who had 
sustained confidential relations to the principals 
and played important parts in the drama of the 
Disputed Succession. These latter had been long 
upon terms of personal intimacy. The occasion was 
informal and joyous, the good fellowship of the 
heartiest. 

Inevitably the conversation drifted to the Elec- 
toral Commission, which had counted Tilden out 
and Hayes in, and of which each of the four had 
some story to tell. Beginning in banter with in- 
terchanges of badinage it presently fell into remi- 
niscence, deepening as the interest of the listeners 
rose to what under different conditions might have 
been described as unguarded gayety if not impru- 
dent garrulity. The little audience was rapt. 

Finally Mr. Cleveland raised both hands and ex- 
claimed, "What would the j)eople of this country 
think if the roof could be lifted from this house and 
they could hear these men?" And then one of the 
four, a gentleman noted for his wealth both of 
money and humor, replied, "But the roof is not 
going to be lifted from this house, and if any one 
repeats what I have said I will denounce him as a 
liar." 

[278] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Once in a while the world is startled by some 
revelation of the unknown which alters the estimate 
of a historic event or figure; but it is measurably 
true, as ^letternich declares, that those who make 
history rarely have time to write it. 

It is not my wish in recurring to the events of 
nearly five-and-forty years ago to invoke and 
awaken any of the passions of that time, nor my 
purpose to assail the character or motives of any 
of the leading actors. Most of them, including the 
principals, I knew well; to many of their secrets 
I was privy. As I was serving, in a sense, as Mr. 
Tilden's personal representative in the Lower 
House of the Forty-fourth Congress, and as a 
member of the joint Democratic Advisory or Steer- 
ing Committee of the two Houses, all that passed 
came more or less, if not under my supervision, yet 
to my knowledge; and long ago I resolved that 
certain matters should remain a sealed book in my 
memory. 

I make no issue of veracity with the living; the 
dead should be sacred. The contradictory prompt- 
ings, not always crooked; the double constructions 
possible to men's actions; the intermingling of am- 
bition and patriotism beneath the lash of party 

[279] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself; some- 
times equivocation deceiving itself — in short, the 
tangled web of good and ill inseparable from great 
affairs of loss and gain made debatable ground for 
every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding. 

I shall bear sure testimony to the integrity of 
Mr. Tilden. I directly know that the presidency 
was offered to him for a price, and that he refused 
it; and I indirectly know and believe that two 
other offers came to him, which also he declined. 
The accusation that he was willing to buy, and 
through the cipher dispatches and other ways tried 
to buy, rests upon appearance supporting mistaken 
surmise. Mr. Tilden knew nothing of the cipher 
dispatches until they appeared in the New York 
Tribune. Neither did Mr. George W. Smith, his 
private secretary, and later one of the trustees of 
his will. 

It should be sufficient to say that so far as they 
involved No. 15 Gramercy Park they were the work 
solely of Colonel Pelton, acting on his own respon- 
sibility, and as Mr. Tilden's nephew exceeding his 
authority to act; that it later developed that dur- 
ing this period Colonel Pelton had not been in his 
perfect mind, but was at least semi-irresponsible; 
[280] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and that on two ocasions when the vote or votes 
sought seemed within reach Mr. Tilden interposed 
to forbid. Directly and personally I know this to 
be true. 

The price, at least in patronage, which the Re- 
publicans actually paid for possession is of public 
record. Yet I not only do not question the integ- 
rity of Mr. Hayes, but I beheve him and most of 
those immediately about him to have been high- 
minded men who thought they were doing for the 
best in a situation unparalleled and beset with per- 
plexity. What they did tends to show that men 
will do for party and in concert what the same men 
never would be willing to do each on his own re- 
sponsibiHty. In his "Life of Samuel J. Tilden," 
John Bigelow says: 

"Why persons occupying the most exalted posi- 
tions should have ventured to compromise their 
reputations by this deliberate consummation of a 
series of crimes which struck at the very founda- 
tions of the republic is a question which still puzzles 
many of all parties who have no charity for the 
crimes themselves. I have already referred to the 
terrors and desperation with which the prospect of 
Tilden's election inspired the great army of office- 

[281] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

holders at the close of Grant's administration. That 
army, numerous and formidable as it was, was com- 
paratively limited. There was a much larger and 
justly influential class who were apprehensive that 
the return of the Democratic party to power threat- 
ened a reactionary policy at Washington, to the un- 
doing of some or all the important results of the 
war. These apprehensions were inflamed by the 
party press until they were confined to no class, 
but more or less pervaded all the Northern States. 
The Electoral Tribunal, consisting mainly of men 
appointed to their positions by Republican Presi- 
dents or elected from strong Republican States, felt 
the pressure of this feeling, and from motives com- 
pounded in more or less varying proportions of 
dread of the Democrats, personal ambition, zeal for 
their party and respect for their constituents, 
reached the conclusion that the exclusion of Tilden 
from the White House was an end which justified 
whatever means were necessary to accomplish it. 
They regarded it, like the emancipation of the 
slaves, as a war measure." 

IV 

The nomination of Horace Greeley in 1872 and 
the overwhelming defeat that followed left the 
[282] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

Democratic party in an abyss of despair. The old 
Whig party, after the disaster that overtook it in 
1852, had been not more demorahzed. Yet in the 
general elections of 1874 the Democrats swept the 
country, carrying many Northern States and send- 
ing a great majority to the Forty-fourth Congress. 

Reconstruction was breaking down of its very 
weight and rottenness. The panic of 1873 reacted 
against the party in power. Dissatisfaction with 
Grant, which had not sufficed two years before to 
displace him, was growing apace. Favoritism bred 
corruption and corruption grew more and more 
flagi-ant. Succeeding scandals cast their shadows 
before. Chickens of carpetbaggery let loose upon 
the South were coming home to roost at the North. 
There appeared everywhere a noticeable subsidence 
of the sectional spirit. Reform was needed alike in 
the State Governments and the National Govern- 
ment, and the cry for reform proved something 
other than an idle word. All things made for 
Democracy. 

Yet there were many and serious handicaps. The 
light and leading of the historic Democratic party 
which had issued from the South were in obscurity 
and abeyance, while most of those surviving who 

[283] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

had been distinguished in the party conduct and 
counsels were disabled by act of Congress. Of the 
few prominent Democrats left at the North many 
were tainted by what was called Copperheadism — ■ 
sympathy with the Confederacy. To find a chief- 
tain wholly free from this contamination, Democ- 
racy, having failed of success in presidential cam- 
paigns, not only with Greeley but with McClellan 
and Seymour, was turning to such Republicans as 
Chase, Field and Da\as. At last heaven seemed to 
smile from the clouds upon the disordered ranks 
and to summon thence a man meeting the require- 
ments of the time. This was Samuel Jones Tilden. 

To his familiars Mr. Tilden was a dear old 
bachelor who lived in a fine old mansion in Gra- 
mercy Park. Though 60 years old he seemed in the 
prime of his manhood; a genial and overflowing 
scholar ; a trained and earnest doctrinaire ; a public- 
spirited, patriotic citizen, well known and highly 
esteemed, who had made fame and fortune at the 
bar and had always been interested in public af- 
fairs. He was a dreamer with a genius for busi- 
ness, a philosopher yet an organizer. He pursued 
the tenor of his life with measured tread. 

His domestic fabric was disfigured by none of the 
[284] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

isolation and squalor which so often attend the con- 
firmed celibate. His home life was a model of 
order and decorum, his home as unchallenged as a 
bishopric, its hospitality, though select, profuse and 
untiring. An elder sister presided at his board, as 
simple, kindly and unostentatious, but as method- 
ical as himself. He was a lover of books rather 
than music and art, but also of horses and dogs and 
out-of-door activity. 

He was fond of young people, particularly of 
young girls; he drew them about him, and was a 
veritable Sir Roger de Coverley in his gallantries 
toward them and his zeal in amusing them and mak- 
ing them happy. His tastes were frugal and their 
indulgence was sparing. He took his wine not 
plenteously, though he enjoyed it — especially his 
"blue seal" while it lasted — and sipped his whisky- 
and-water on occasion with a pleased composure 
redolent of discursive talk, of which, when he cared 
to lead the conversation, he was a master. He had 
early come into a great legal practice and held a 
commanding professional position. His judgment 
was believed to be infallible; and it is certain that 
after 1871 he rarely appeared in the courts of law 

[285] 



"MARSE HENUY" 

except as counsellor, settling in chambers most of 
the cases that came to him. 

It was such a man whom, in 1874, the Democrats 
nominated for Governor of New York. To say 
truth, it was not thought by those making the 
nomination that he had any chance to win. He 
was himself so much better advised that months 
ahead he prefigured very near the exact vote. The 
afternoon of the day of election one of the group 
of friends, who even thus early had the Presidency 
in mind, found him in his library confident and 

calm. 

"What majority will you have?" he asked 
cheerily. 

"Any," replied the friend sententiously. 

"How about fifteen thousand?" 

"Quite enough." 

"Twenty-five thousand?" 

"Still better." 

"The majority," he said, "will be a little in ex- 
cess of fifty thousand." 

It was 53,315. His estimate was not guesswork. 

He had organized his campaign by school districts. 

His canvass system was perfect, his canvassers were 

as penetrating and careful as census takers. He 

[286] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

had before him reports from every voting precinct 
in the State. They were corroborated by the offi- 
cial returns. He had defeated Gen. John A. Dix, 
thought to be invincible by a majority very nearly 
the same as that by which Governor Dix had been 
elected two years before. 

y 

The time and the man had met. Though Mr. 
Tilden had not before held executive office he was 
ripe and ready for the work. His experience in 
the pursuit and overthrow of the Tweed Ring in 
New York, the great metropolis, had prepared and 
fitted him to deal with the Canal Ring at Albany, 
the State capital. Administrative reform was now 
uppermost in the public mind, and here in the Em- 
pire State of the Union had come to the head of 
affairs a Chief Magistrate at once exact and exact- 
ing, deeply versed not only in legal lore but in a 
knowledge of the methods by which poHtical power 
was being turned to private profit and of the men — 
Democrats as well as Republicans — who were prey- 
ing upon the substance of the people. 

The story of the two years that followed relates 

[287] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

to investigations that investigated, to prosecutions 
that convicted, to the overhauling of popular cen- 
sorship, to reduced estimates and lower taxes. 

The campaign for the Presidential nomination 
began as early as the autumn of 1875. The South- 
ern end of it was easy enough. A committee of 
Southerners residing in New York was formed. 
Never a leading Southern man came to town who 
was not "seen." If of enough importance he was 
taken to No. 15 Gramercy Park. Mr. Tilden meas- 
ured to the Southern standard of the gentleman in 
politics. He impressed the disfranchised South- 
ern leaders as a statesman of the old order and al- 
together after their own ideas of what a President 
ought to be. 

The South came to St. Louis, the seat of the 
National Convention, represented by its foremost 
citizens, and almost a unit for the Governor of New 
York. The main opposition sprang from Tam- 
many Hall, of which John Kelly was then the chief. 
Its very extravagance proved an advantage to Til- 
den. 

Two days before the meeting of the convention 
I sent this message to Mr. Tilden: "Tell Black- 
[288] 



*'MARSE HENRY" 

stone" — his favorite riding horse — "that he wins in 
a walk." 

The anti-Tilden men put up the Hon. S. S. — 
"Sunset" — Cox for temporary chairman. It was 
a clever move. Mr. Cox, though sure for Tam- 
many, was popular everywhere and especially at 
the South. His backers thought that with him they 
could count a majority of the National Committee. 

The night before the assembling Mr. Tilden's two 
or three leading friends on the committee came to 
me and said: "We can elect you chairman over 
Cox, but no one else." 

I demurred at once. "I don't know one rule of 
parliamentary law from another," I said. 

"We will have the best parliamentarian on the 
continent right by you all the time," they said. 

"I can't see to recognize a man on the floor of 
the convention," I said. 

"We'll have a dozen men at hand to tell you," 
they replied. So it was arranged, and thus at the 
last moment I was chosen. 

I had barely time to write the required keynote 
speech, but not enough to commit it to memory; 
nor sight to read it, even had I been willing to 
adopt that mode of delivery. It would not do to 

[289] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

trust to extemporization. A friend, Col. J. Stod- 
dard Johnston, who was familiar with my penman- 
ship, came to the rescue. Concealing my manu- 
script behind his hat he lined the words out to me 
between the cheering, I having mastered a few 
opening sentences. 

Luck was with me. It went with a bang — not, 
however, wholly without detection. The Indianans, 
devoted to Hendricks, were very wroth. 

"See that fat man behind the hat telling him 
what to say," said one to his neighbor, who an- 
swered, "Yes, and wrote it for him, too, I'll be 
bound!" 

One might as well attempt to drive six horses by 
proxy as preside over a national convention by 
hearsay. I lost my parliamentarian at once. I just 
made my parliamentary law as we went. Never 
before or since did any deliberate body proceed un- 
der manual so startling and original. But I de- 
livered each ruling with a resonance — it were bet- 
ter called an impudence — which had an air of au- 
thority. There was a good deal of quiet laughter 
on the floor among the knowing ones, though I 
knew the mass was as ignorant as I was myself; 
but realizing that I meant to be just and was ex- 
[290] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

pediting business the convention soon warmed to 
me, and feeling this I began to be perfectly at 
home. I never had a better day's sport in all my 
hfe. 

One incident was particularly amusing. Much 
against my will and over my protest I was brought 
to promise that Miss Phoebe Couzins, who bore a 
Woman's Rights Memorial, should at some oppor- 
tune moment be given the floor to present it. I 
foresaw what a row it was bound to occasion. 

Toward noon, when there was a lull in the pro- 
ceedings, I said with an emphasis meant to carry 
conviction: "Gentlemen of the convention, Miss 
Phoebe Couzins, a representative of the Woman's 
Association of America, has a memorial from that 
body, and in the absence of other business the chair 
will now recognize her." 

Instantly and from every part of the hall arose 
cries of "No!" These put some heart into me. 
Many a time as a schoolboy I had proudly de- 
claimed the passage from John Home's tragedy, 
"My Name is Norval." Again I stood upon "the 
Grampian hills." The committee was escorting 
Miss Couzins down the aisle. When she came with- 

[291] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

in the radius of my poor vision I saw that she w^s 
a beauty and dressed to kill. 

That was reassurance. Gaining a little time 
while the hall fairly rocked with its thunder of 
negation I laid the gavel down and stepped to the 
edge of the platform and gave Miss Couzins my 
hand. 

As she appeared above the throng there was a 
momentary "All!" and then a lull, broken by a 
single voice: 

"Mister Chairman. I rise to a point of order." 

Leading Miss Couzins to the front of the stage 
I took up the gavel and gave a gentle rap, saying: 
"The gentleman will take his seat." 

"But, Mister Chairman, I rose to a point of 
order," he vociferated. 

"The gentleman will take his seat instantly," I 
answered in a tone of one about to throw the gavel 
at his head. "No point of order is in order when a 
lady has the floor." 

After that Miss Couzins received a positive ova- 
tion and having delivered her message retired in a 
blaze of glory. 

[292] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

VI 

Mr. Tilden was nominated on the second ballot. 
The campaign that followed proved one of the most 
memorable in our history. When it came to an end 
the result showed on the face of the returns 196 
in the Electoral College, eleven more than a ma- 
jority; and in the popular vote 4,300,316, a ma- 
jority of 264,300 for Tilden over Hayes. 

How this came to be first contested and then 
compHcated so as ultimately to be set aside has been 
minutely related by its authors. The newspapers, 
both Republican and Democratic, of November 8, 
1876, the morning after the election, conceded an 
overwhelming victory for Tilden and Hendricks. 
There was, however, a single exception. The New 
York Times had gone to press with its first edition, 
leaving the result in doubt but inclining toward the 
success of the Democrats. In its later editions this 
tentative attitude was changed to the statement 
that INIr. Hayes lacked the vote of Florida — 
"claimed by the Republicans" — to be sure of the 
required votes in the Electoral College, 

The story of this surprising discrepancy be- 
tween midnight and daylight reads hke a chapter of 

fiction. 

[293] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

After the early edition of the Times had gone to 
press certain members of the editorial staff were at 
supper, very much cast down by the returns, when 
a messenger brought a telegram from Senator 
Barnum, of Connecticut, financial head of the 
Democratic National Committee, asking for the 
Times' latest news from Oregon, Louisiana, 
Florida and South Carolina. But for that un- 
lucky telegram Tilden would probably have been 
inaugurated President of the United States. 

The Times people, intense Republican partisans, 
at once saw an opportunity. If Barnum did not 
know, why might not a doubt be raised? At once 
the editorial in the first edition was revised to take 
a decisive tone and declare the election of Hayes. 
One of the editorial council, Mr. John C. Reid, 
hurried to Republican headquarters in the Fifth 
Avenue Hotel, which he found deserted, the 
triumph of Tilden having long before sent every- 
body to bed. Mr. Reid then sought the room of 
Senator Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the Na- 
tional Republican Committee. 

While upon this errand he encountered in the 
hotel corridor "a small man wearing an enormous 
pair of goggles, his hat drawn over his ears, a great- 
[294] 



*'MARSE HENRY" 

coat with a heavy mihtary cloak, and carrying a 
gripsack and newspaper in his hand. The news- 
paper was the New York Tribune," announcing 
the election of Tilden and the defeat of Hayes. The 
newcomer was jNIr. William E. Chandler, even then 
a very prominent Republican pohtician, just ar- 
rived from New Hampshire and very much ex- 
asperated by what he had read. 

Mr. Reid had another tale to tell. The two 
found ^Ir. Zachariah Chandler, who bade them 
leave him alone and do whatever they thought best. 
They did so, consumingly, sending telegrams to 
Columbia, Tallahassee and New Orleans, stating 
to each of the parties addressed that the result of 
the election depended upon his State. To these was 
appended the signature of Zachariah Chandler. 

Later in the day Senator Chandler, advised of 
what had been set on foot and its possibilities, is- 
sued from National Republican headquarters this 
laconic message: "Hayes has 185 electoral votes 
and is elected." 

Thus began and was put in motion the scheme to 
confuse the returns and make a disputed count of 

the vote. 

[295] 



"MARSE HENRY" 



VII 



The day after the election I wired Mr. Tilden 
suggesting that as Governor of New York he pro- 
pose to Mr. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio, that they 
unite upon a committee of eminent citizens, com- 
posed in equal numbers of the friends of each, who 
should proceed at once to Louisiana, which ap- 
peared to be the objective point of greatest moment 
to the already contested result. Pursuant to a tele- 
graphic correspondence which followed, I left 
Louisville that night for New Orleans. I was joined 
en route by Mr. Lamar and General Walthal, of 
jMississippi, and together we arrived in the Cres- 
cent City Friday morning. 

It has since transpired that the Republicans were 
promptly advised by the Western Union Telegraph 
Company of all that had passed over its wires, my 
dispatches to ]Mr. Tilden being read in Republican 
headquarters at least as soon as they reached Gram- 
ercy Park. 

Mr. Tilden did not adopt the plan of a direct 
proposal to Mr. Hayes. Instead he chose a body 
of Democrats to go to the "seat of war." But be- 
fore any of them had arrived General Grant, the 
[296] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

actual President, anticipating what was about to 
happen, appointed a body of Republicans for the 
like purpose, and the advance guard of these ap- 
peared on the scene the following Monday. 

Within a week the St. Charles Hotel might have 
been mistaken for a caravansary of the national 
capital. Among the Repubhcans were John Sher- 
man, Stanley JMatthews, Garfield, Evarts, Logan, 
Kelley, Stoughton, and many others. Among the 
Democrats, besides Lamar, Walthal and myself, 
came Lyman Trumbull, Samuel J. Randall, Wil- 
liam R. Morrfson, McDonald, of Indiana, and 
many others. 

A certain degree of personal intimacy existed 
between the members of the two groups, and the 
"entente" was quite as unrestrained as might have 
existed between rival athletic teams. A Kentucky 
friend sent me a demijohn of what was represented 
as very old Bourbon, and I divided it with "our 
friends the enemy." New Orleans was new to most 
of the "visiting statesmen," and we attended the 
places of amusement, lived in the restaurants, and 
saw the sights as if we had been tourists in a foreign 
land and not partisans charged with the business 

[297] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

of adjusting a Presidential election from implacable 
points of view. 

My own relations were especially friendly with 
John Sherman and James A. Garfield, a colleague 
on the Committee of Ways and Means, and with 
Stanley Matthews, a near kinsman by marriage, 
who had stood as an elder brother to me from my 
childhood. 

Corruption was in the air. That the Returning 
Board was for sale and could be bought was the 
universal impression. Every day some one turned 
up with pretended authority and an offer to sell. 
Most of these were, of course, the merest adven- 
turers. It was my own belief that the Returning 
Board was playing for the best price it could get 
from the Republicans and that the only effect of 
any offer to buy on our part would be to assist this 
scheme of blackmail. 

The Returning Board consisted of two white 
men, Wells and Anderson; and two negroes, Ken- 
ner and Casanave. One and all they were without 
character. I was tempted through sheer curiosity 
to listen to a proposal which seemed to come direct 
from the board itself, the messenger being a well- 
known State Senator. As if he were proposing to 
[298] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

dispose of a horse or a dog he stated his errand. 

"You think you can deliver the goods?" said I. 

"I am authorized to make the offer," he an- 
swered. 

"And for how much?" I asked. 

"Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars," he 
replied. "One hundred thousand each for Wells 
and Anderson, and twenty-five thousand apiece for 
the niggers." 

To my mind it was a joke. "Senator," said I, 
"the terms are as cheap as dirt. I don't happen 
to have the amount about me at the moment, but 
I will communicate with my principal and see you 
later." 

Ha\ing no thought of entertaining the proposal, 
I had forgotten the incident, when two or three 
days later my man met me in the lobby of the hotel 
and pressed for a definite reply. I then told him 
I had found that I possessed no authority to act 
and advised him to go elsewhere. 

It is asserted that Wells and Anderson did agree 
to sell and were turned down by Mr. Hewitt ; and, 
being refused their demands for cash by the Demo- 
crats, took their final pay, at least in patronage, 
from their own party. 

[299] 



"MAKSE HENRY" 

VIII 

I passed the Christmas week of 1876 in New 
York with Mr. Tilden. On Christmas day we dined 
alone. The outlook, on the whole, was cheering. 
With John Bigelow and Manton JNIarble, Mr. Til- 
den had been busily engaged compiling the data for 
a constitutional battle to be fought by the Demo- 
crats in Congress, maintaining the right of the 
House of Representatives to concurrent jurisdic- 
tion with the Senate in the counting of the elec- 
toral vote, pursuant to an unbroken line of prec- 
edents established by that method of proceeding in 
every presidential election between 1793 and 1872. 

There was very great perplexity in the pubhe 
mind. Both parties appeared to be at sea. The 
dispute between the Democratic House and the Re- 
publican Senate made for thick weather. Contests 
of the vote of three States — Louisiana, South Caro- 
lina and Florida, not to mention single votes in 
Oregon and Vermont — which presently began to 
blow a gale, had already spread menacing clouds 
across the political sky. Except Mr. Tilden, the 
wisest among the leaders knew not precisely what 
to do. 

[300] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

From N"ew Orleans, on the Saturday night suc- 
ceeding the presidential election, I had telegraphed 
to Mr. Tilden detailing the exact conditions there 
and urging active and immediate agitation. The 
chance had been lost. I thought then and I still 
think that the conspiracy of a few men to use the 
corrupt returning boards of Louisiana, South Caro- 
lina and Florida to upset the election and make con- 
fusion in Congress might by prompt exposure and 
popular appeal have been thwarted. Be this as it 
may, my spirit was depressed and my confidence 
discouraged by the intense quietude on our side, for 
I was sure that beneath the surface the Republi- 
cans, with resolute determination and multiplied 
resources, were as busy as bees. 

Mr. Robert M. McLane, later Governor of 
Maryland and later still Minister to France — a 
man of rare ability and large expreience, who had 
served in Congress and in diplomacy, and was an 
old friend of Mr. Tilden — had been at a Gramercy 
Park conference when my New Orleans report ar- 
rived, and had then and there urged the agitation 
recommended by me. He was now again in New 
York. When a lad he had been in England with 
his father, Lewis McLane, then American Minister 

[301] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

to the Court of St. James, during the excitement 
over the Reform Bill of 1832. He had witnessed 
the popular demonstrations and had been impressed 
by the direct force of public opinion upon law- 
making and law-makers. An analogous situation 
had arrived in America. The Republican Senate 
was as the Tory House of Lords. We must or- 
ganize a movement such as had been so effectual 
in England. Obviously something was going amiss 
with us and something had to be done. 

It was agreed that I should return to Washing- 
ton and make a speech "feeling the pulse" of the 
country, with the suggestion that in the National 
Capital should assemble "a mass convention of at 
least 100,000 peaceful citizens," exercising "the 
freeman's right of petition." 

The idea was one of many proposals of a more 
drastic kind and was the merest venture. I myself 
had no great faith in it. But I prepared the speech, 
and after much reading and revising, it was held by 
Mr. Tilden and Mr. McLane to cover the case and 
meet the purpose, Mr. Tilden writing Mr. Randall, 
Speaker of the House of Representatives, a letter, 
carried to Washington by Mr. McLane, instruct- 
[302] 



"MARSE HEXRY" 

ing him what to do in the event that the popular 
response should prove favorable. 

Alack the day! The Democrats were equal to 
nothing affirmative. The Republicans were united 
and resolute. I delivered the speech, not in the 
House, as had been intended, but at a public meet- 
ing which seemed opportune. The Democrats at 
once set about denying the sinister and violent pur- 
pose ascribed to it by the Republicans, who, fully 
advised that it had emanated from Gramercy Park 
and came by authority, started a counter agitation 
of their own. 

I became the target for every kind of ridicule and 
abuse. 'Nasi drew a grotesque cartoon of me, dis- 
torting my suggestion for the assembling of 100,- 
000 citizens, which was both offensive and libellous. 
Being on friendly terms with the Harpers, I made 
my displeasure so resonant in Franklin Square — 
Nast himself having no personal ill will toward me 
— ^that a curious and pleasing opportunity which 
came to pass was taken to make amends. A son 
having been born to me. Harper's Weekly con- 
tained an atoning cartoon representing the child in 
its father's arms, and, above, the legend "10,000 
sons from Kentucky alone." Some wag said that 

[303] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the son in question was "the only one of the 100,- 
000 in arms who came when he was called." 

For many years afterward I was pursued by 
this unlucky speech, or rather by the misinterpreta- 
tion given to it alike by friend and foe. Nast's first 
cartoon was accepted as a faithful portrait, and I 
was accordingly satirized and stigmatized, though 
no thought of violence ever had entered my mind, 
and in the final proceedings I had voted for the 
Electoral Commission Bill and faithfully stood by 
its decisions. Joseph PuHtzer, who immediately 
followed me on the occasion named, declared that 
he wanted my "one hundred thousand" to come 
fully armed and ready for business; yet he never 
was taken to task or reminded of his temerity. 

IX 

The Electoral Commission Bill was considered 
with great secrecy by the joint committees of the 
House and Senate. Its terms were in direct con- 
travention of Mr. Tilden's plan. This was sim- 
plicity itself. He was for asserting by formal reso- 
lution the conclusive right of the two Houses act- 
ing concurrently to count the electoral vote and de- 
termine what should be counted as electoral votes; 
[304] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

and for denying, also by formal resolution, the 
pretension set up by the Republicans that the Presi- 
dent of the Senate had lawful right to assume that 
function. He was for urging that issue in debate 
in both Houses and before the country. He thought 
that if the attempt should be made to usurp for 
the president of the Senate a power to make the 
count, and thus practically to control the Presi- 
dential election, the scheme would break down in 
process of execution. 

Strange to say, Mr. Tilden was not consulted by 
the party leaders in Congress until the fourteenth 
of January, and then only by Mr. Hewitt, the extra 
constitutional features of the electoral-tribunal 
measure having already received the assent of Mr. 
Bayard and Mr. Thurman, the Democratic mem- 
bers of the Senate committee. 

Standing by his original plan and answering 
Mr. Hewitt's statement that Mr. Bayard and Mr. 
Thurman were fully committed, ]Mr. Tilden said: 
*Ts it not, then, rather late to consult me?" 

To which Mr. Hewitt rephed: "They do not con- 
sult you. They are public men, and have their own 
duties and responsibilities. I consult you." 

In the course of the discussion with INIr. Hewitt 

[305] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

which followed Mr. Tilden said: "If you go into 
conference with your adversary, and can't break off 
because you feel you must agree to something, you 
cannot negotiate — you are not fit to negotiate. 
You will be beaten upon every detail." 

Replying to the apprehension of a collision of 
force between the parties Mr. Tilden thought it 
exaggerated, but said: "Why surrender now? You 
can always surrender. Why surrender before the 
battle for fear you may have to surrender after the 
battle?" 

In short, Mr. Tilden condemned the proceeding 
as precipitate. It was a month before the time for 
the count, and he saw no reason why opportunity 
should not be given for consideration and consulta- 
tion by all the representatives of the people. He 
treated the state of mind of Bayard and Thurman 
as a panic in which they were liable to act in haste 
and repent at leisure. He stood for publicity and 
wider discussion, distrusting a scheme to submit 
such vast interests to a small body sitting in the 
Capitol as likely to become the sport of intrigue and 
fraud. 

Mr. Hewitt returned to Washington and with- 
out communicating to Mr. Tilden's immediate 
[306] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

friends in the House his attitude and objection, 
united with Mr. Thurman and jNIr. Bayard in com- 
pleting the bill and reporting it to the Democratic 
Advisory Committee, as, by a caucus rule, had to 
be done with all measures relating to the great issue 
then before us. No intimation had preceded it. It 
fell like a bombshell upon the members of the com- 
mittee. 

In the debate that followed Mr. Bayard was very 
insistent, answering the objections at once offered 
by me, first aggressively and then angrily, going the 
length of saying, "If you do not accept this plan I 
shall wash my hands of the whole business, and 
you can go ahead and seat your President in your 
own way." 

Mr. Randall, the Speaker, said nothing, but he 
was with me, as were a majority of my colleagues. 
It was Mr. Hunton, of Virginia, who poured oil 
on the troubled waters, and somewhat in doubt as 
to whether the changed situation had changed Mr. 
Tilden I yielded my better judgment, declaring it 
as my opinion that the plan would seat Hayes ; and 
there being no other protestant the committee 
finally gave a reluctant assent. 

In open session a majority of Democrats favored 

[307] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

the bill. Many of them made it their own. They 
passed it. There was belief that Justice David 
Davis, who was expected to become a member of 
the commission, was sure for Tilden. If, under this 
surmise, he had been, the political complexion of 
"8 to 7" would have been reversed. 

Elected to the United States Senate from Illi- 
nois, Judge Davis declined to serve, and Mr. Jus- 
tice Bradley was chosen for the commission in his 
place. 

The day after the inauguration of Hayes my 
kinsman, Stanley Matthews, said to me: "You 
people wanted Judge Davis. So did we. I tell 
you what I know, that Judge Davis was as safe for 
us as Judge Bradley. We preferred him because 
he carried more weight." 

The subsequent career of Judge Davis in the 
Senate gave conclusive proof that this was true. 

When the consideration of the disputed votes 
before the commission had proceeded far enough to 
demonstrate the likehhood that its final decision 
would be for Hayes a movement of obstruction and 
delay, a filibuster, was organized by about forty 
Democratic members of the House. It proved 
rather turbulent than effective. The South stood 
[308] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

very nearly solid for carrying out the agreement 
in good faith. 

Toward the close the filibuster received what ap- 
peared formidable reinforcement from the 
Louisiana delegation. This was in reality merely 
a bluff, intended to induce the Hayes people to 
make certain concessions touching their State gov- 
ernment. It had the desired effect. Satisfactory 
assurances having been given, the count proceeded 
to the end — a very bitter end indeed for the Demo- 
crats. 

The final conference between the Louisianans 
and the accredited representatives of IMr. Hayes 
was held at Wormley's Hotel and came to be called 
"the Wormley Conference." It was the subject of 
uncommon interest and heated controversy at the 
time and long afterward. Without knowing why 
or for what purpose, I was asked to be present by 
my colleague, Mr. Ellis, of Louisiana, and later in 
the day the same invitation came to me from the 
Republicans through Mr. Garfield. Something 
was said about my serving as a referee. 

Just before the appointed hour Gen. M. C. But- 
ler, of South Carolina, afterward so long a Senator 
in Congress, said to me: "This meeting is called to 

[309] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

enable Louisiana to make terms with Hayes. South 
Carolina is as deeply concerned as Louisiana, but 
we have nobody to represent us in Congress and 
hence have not been invited. South Carolina puts 
herself in your hands and expects you to secure for 
her whatever terms are given to Louisiana." 

So of a sudden I found myself invested with re- 
sponsibility equally as an agent and a referee. 

It is hardly worth while repeating in detail all 
that passed at this Wormley Conference, made pub- 
lic long ago by Congressional investigation. When 
I entered the apartment of Mr. Evarts at Worm- 
ley's I found, besides Mr. Evarts, ^Ir. John Sher- 
man, ^Ir. Garfield, Governor Dennison, and Mr. 
Stanley Matthews, of the Republicans; and Mr. 
Ellis, ]Mr. Levy, and Mr. Burke, Democrats of 
Louisiana. Substantially the terms had been agreed 
upon during the previous conferences — that is, the 
promise that if Hayes came in the troops should be 
withdrawn and the people of Louisiana be left free 
to set their house in order to suit themselves. The 
actual order withdrawing the troops was issued by 
President Grant two or three days later, just as he 
was going out of office. 

"Now, gentlemen," said I, half in jest, "I am 
[310] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

here to represent South Carohna; and if the terms 
given to Louisiana are not equally applied to South 
Carolina I become a filibuster myself to-morrow 
morning." 

There was some chaffing as to what right I had 
there and how I got in, when with great earnest- 
ness Governor Dennison, who had been the bearer 
of a letter from JMr. Hayes, which he had read to 
us, put his hand on my shoulder and said: "As a 
matter of course the Southern policy to which Mr. 
Hayes has here pledged himself embraces South 
Carolina as well as Louisiana." 

Mr. Sherman, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Evarts con- 
curred warmly in this, and immediately after we 
separated I communicated the fact to General But- 
ler. 

In the acrimonious discussion which subsequently 
sought to make "bargain, intrigue and corrup- 
tion" of this Wormley Conference, and to involve 
certain Democratic members of the House who 
were nowise party to it but had sympathized with 
the purpose of Louisiana and South Carolina to ob- 
tain some measure of relief from intolerable local 
conditions, I never was questioned or assailed. No 
one doubted my fidelity to Mr. Tilden, who had 

[311] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

been promptly advised of all that passed and who 
approved what I had done. 

Though "conscripted," as it were, and rather a 
passive agent, I could see no wrong in the proceed- 
ing. I had spoken and voted in favor of the Elec- 
toral Tribunal Bill, and losing, had no thought of 
repudiating its conclusions. Hayes was already as 
good as seated. If the States of Louisiana and 
South Carolina could save their local autonomy out 
of the general wreck there seemed no good reason 
to forbid. 

On the other hand, the Republican leaders were 
glad of an opportunity to make an end of the cor- 
rupt and tragic farce of Reconstruction ; to unload 
their party of a dead weight which had been bur- 
densome and was growing dangerous; mayhap to 
punish their Southern agents, who had demanded 
so much for doctoring the returns and making an 
exhibit in favor of Hayes. 



Mr. Tilden accepted the result with equanimity. 

"I was at his house," says John Bigelow, "when 
his exclusion was announced to him, and also on 
the fourth of March when Mr. Hayes was in- 

,1:312] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

augurated, and it was impossible to remark any 
change in his manner, except perhaps that he was 
less absorbed than usual and more interested in cur- 
rent affairs." 

His was an intensely serious mind; and he had 
come to regard the presidency as rather a burden 
to be borne — an opportunity for public usefulness 
— involving a life of constant toil and care, than 
as an occasion for personal exploitation and re- 
joicing. 

How much of captivation the idea of the presi- 
dency may have had for him when he was first 
named for the office I cannot say, for he was as 
unexultant in the moment of victoiy as he was 
unsubdued in the hour of defeat ; but it is certainly 
true that he gave no sign of disappointment to any 
of his friends. 

He lived nearly ten years longer, at Greystone, 
in a noble homestead he had purchased for himself 
overlooking the Hudson River, the same ideal life 
of the scholar and gentleman that he had passed 
in Gramercy Park. 

Looking back over these untoward and some- 
times mystifying events, I have often asked myself : 
Was it possible, with the elements what they were, 

[313] 



"MATISE HENRY" 

and he himself what he was, to seat Mr. Tilden in 
the office to which he had been elected? The miss- 
ing ingredient in a character intellectually and 
morally great and a personality far from unim- 
pressive, was the touch of the dramatic discover- 
able in most of the leaders of men; even in such 
leaders as William of Orange and Louis XI; as 
Cromwell and Washington. 

There was nothing spectacular about Mr. Til- 
den. Not wanting the sense of humor, he seldom 
indulged it. In spite of his positiveness of opinion 
and amphtude of knowledge he was always courte- 
ous and deferential in debate. He had none of the 
audacious daring, let us say, of ]\Ir. Blaine, the 
energetic self-assertion of Mr. Roosevelt. Either 
in his place would have carried all before him. 

I repeat that he was never a subtle schemer — 
sitting behind the screen and pulling his wires — 
which his political and party enemies discovered 
him to»be as soon as he began to get in the way 
of the machine and obstruct the march of the self- 
elect. His confidences were not effusive, nor their 
subjects numerous. His deliberation was unfail- 
ing and sometimes it carried the idea of indecision, 
not to say actual love of procrastination. But in my 
[314] 



"MARSE HENRY" 

experience with him I found that he usually ended 
where he hegan, and it was nowise difficult for those 
whom he trusted to divine the hias of his mind 
where he thought it best to reserve its conclusions. 

I do not think in any great affair he ever hesi- 
tated longer than the gravity of the case required 
of a prudent man or that he had a preference for 
delays or that he clung tenaciously to both horns 
of the dilemma, as his training and instinct might 
lead him to do, and did certainly expose him to 
the accusation of doing. 

He was a philosopher and took the world as he 
found it. He rarely complained and never in- 
veighed. He had a discriminating way of balanc- 
ing men's good and bad qualities and of giving each 
the benefit of a generous accounting, and a just way 
of expecting no more of a man thari^it was in him 
to yield. As he got into deeper water his stature 
rose to its level, and from his exclusion from the 
presidency in 1877 to his renunciation of public af- 
fairs in 1884 and his death in 1886 his walks and 
ways might have been a study for all who would 
leam life's truest lessons and know the real sources 
of honor, happiness and fame. 

[315] 



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